Brett Steele was recently reappointed AA’s director
Brett Steele was re-elected as Architectural Association (AA) school director in November last year. In a poll of the tutors and students – the established system of electing directors at the AA – Steele won 74 per cent of the vote giving him another five-year term, and a mandate to continue his programme of change and expansion at the famous school.
Since 2005, he’s added five Georgian buildings to the school’s Bedford Square HQ, which were opened to the public for the first time at this year’s Projects Review. In addition, the head allocated the school’s largest ever single donation, from Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford, to the development of its rural campus at Hooke Park in Dorset. Furthermore, this year’s Projects Review showed an unusually diverse range of student work – the consequence of an increasingly broad church of tutors at the school.
The evolution of the AA under Steele’s leadership could be seen throughout the show. The experimental pavilions, a familiar sight from previous Reviews, were absent, and the output of the Design Research Laboratory (DRL) seemed overwhelmed by the work of other units, spread throughout the AA’s growing campus. In a remark which the DRL’s current director, Patrik Schumacher, might find alarming, Steele himself sees this as a natural consequence of changing times: ‘the parametric wave, of which we were such a prominent part, is now receding.’
At the Projects Review, the designs for the next element of Steele’s venture in Hooke Park were on show. The Intermediate 2 unit of the AA is building a house for the caretaker and family of the 142ha of woodland in Dorest which it acquired in 2002. Previously Hooke Park belonged to the Parnham Trust and was the site of two experimental buildings by Frei Otto – a workshop and refectory – and a dormitory designed by Edward Cullinan. The AA’s first significant building to be constructed in Hooke Park since 2002 is more practical and, it has to be said, less ambitious. ‘It’s not a formal experiment as much as a deliverable, small-scale house for a family that’s already on site. In fact we workedquite closely with them as the clients for it,’ he says.
Andrea Gillow Kloster and Harshit Kothari’s winning proposal for the caretaker’s house in Hooke Park. It will go on site later this year
When Steele took over as director at the Association, he was deeply affiliated with the work of the Design Research Laboratory, of which he was founder and first director. It was the experimental output of the DRL, heavily based upon parametric design techniques, that has characterised the AA over the last 10 years. The AA may take some time to lose its assocation with parametricism. Nigel Coates, an exstudent and ex-tutor at the AA, says that ‘my impression [of the school] is that it’s obsessed with geometry.’
Steele, however, is more interested in networks. The growing network of Visiting Schools, where AA staff are sent to locations around the world to lead workshops and lead temporary schools, creates what Steele refers to as a ‘longitudinal model’. In this second term, the unit system pioneered by the AA in the 1970s looks to have become more diverse. Steele also sees his role as being involved in educating and interesting a wider audience.
‘Our job isn’t creating architecture, it’s creating audiences… It doesn’t matter how well you can design a building, if there isn’t an audience who will appreciate and understand it,’ he says. As a result, Steele has placed greater emphasis on the AA’s public programme of talks and events, which is in some respects a return to the original model of the Association. ‘I find it a more interesting way to think about how you organise a school, rather than just producing an architect. That should be a by-product of doing something else well,’ he says.
At the Projects Review, the increased diversity was clear. Architecture influenced by sci-fi narrative work of Liam Young’s Intermediate 7 unit contrasted with the FAT-ty work of Sam Jacob’s students. The serious, more conventional architecture was produced by students under tutelage Miraj Ahmad, who also teaches at Cambridge University. Steele imagines a time when the Georgian pile, in which the AA currently sits, becomes less important, and the school becomes the composite result of many different, parallel activities spread across the world.
Steele’s new vision for the AA is less formally clear than the old one. Yet the school’s charitable status, away from government funding, does allow a unique opportunity to experiment. The future, he says, is entirely unknown: ‘as the director that’s great, because the form of the school is entirely up for reinvention.’
