Brett Steele, Director, AA School

‘Never judge a book by its cover’ – the phrase, a succinct expression of the truism that we need to observe caution when making conclusions based on appearances, seems to have first found its way into print in George Eliot’s novel of 1860, The Mill on the Floss. (Eliot’s real name was Mary Anne Evans, but that’s another Victorian tale altogether.) Interestingly, the sentiment was recorded at roughly the same time that the still-young Architectural Association began publishing (arts and crafts, leather-bound) books of its own.

Since the nineteenth century numerous modern and postmodern theories, histories and practices have sought to update what was for Eliot’s generation hardly more than Victorian instinct, giving us more complex accounts of why we should go beyond appearances or outward arrangements when assessing the architectural (or any other) quality of goodness, content or meaning.

I offer this brief synopsis by way of marking a certain coincidence with our own life as an Architectural Association, in terms of contrasting content or form with outside appearance. It was almost a century ago, in the 1920s, that the AA itself settled behind the orderly, uniform Georgian facades of the buildings on Bedford Square and began cultivating its lifelong reputation as the world’s most experimental and international school of architecture.

For the past century, just about the last place you could find echoes of Georgian neoclassical order and composition has been the portfolios or projects of our students or the pedagogies or personalities of our teachers. Equally, our approach to architectural targets and habits of a modern, even contemporary guise is not simply to learn from them, but rather to engage with them, critique and push them to the point of breaking in order to discover and make that which we value above all else: new kinds of architectural ideas, projects, concepts and practices.

How better to embody and express the unbelievably contradictory and frequently contrarian, inward and self-contained qualities of ourselves as a school than reminding ourselves how we too have been judged by our outward appearances?

Going against the grain, doing the unexpected, rejecting the cliché – all this, you might just say, is in our DNA (or is it DNAA?). We believe the future becomes knowable in no small way through architectural work that transforms architectural minds everywhere. Since the AA’s establishment, its students, teachers and graduates have gone on to do this. Across a twenty-first-century world of unimaginable complexity, speed and cultural transformation, today’s students will continue to do so too.

In common with Projects Review exhibition and book, this website is the annual compendium of teaching, learning and other activities recorded during the past 12 months of school. It invokes the contradictions of the very truism I cite above, which we as a school already know all too well: we are different on the inside from what might appear on the outside. And this matters less than our awareness of both.

My thanks here to everyone involved in making the AA everything we seek to be and reveal today – a school that turns itself inside-out, due in no small part to the architectural minds that inhabit its every structure, habit and expectation.