The AA Archive is a teaching and study resource open to all AA students, members and external readers. It documents the AA’s educational, cultural and organisational history, holding in excess of 10,000 drawings and 800 cubic feet of records, alongside digital portfolios, manuscripts, models and posters.
A major proportion of AA Archives’ collections consist of student projects from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, including examples of work by such luminaries as Sir Andrew Derbyshire, Kenneth Frampton, Alan Colquhoun, John Miller, Piers Gough and Peter Wilson. We also collect records relating to the theory and practice of architectural education - such as lecture notes and teaching records – thus aiming to preserve evidence of the teaching methodologies, systems and pedagogies that have evolved at the AA.
Major collections held within the AA Archives include The Royal Architectural Museum Archive (a national museum of gothic casts owned by the AA in the early 20thC) and the Otto Koenigsberger Archive.
Recent additions to the collections and newly catalogued items, displayed this year in the Projects Review exhibition, include the manuscript for an unpublished novel by Alison Smithson, drawings by John Hejduk, Nicholas Boyarsky and Robin Evans, alongside examples from the ‘AA Scrapbooks’ of ephemera dating back to the AA’s foundation in the 1840s...
