The Architecture Foundation (AF) and the Royal College of Art (RCA) School of Architecture have formed a new events partnership. As part of the partnership, the RCA’s School of Architecture is hosting the AF team at its premises in Kensington Gore and together they are staging a programme of live public events to highlight the work of emerging Architecture practices.
The event series will provide opportunities for young practices to present their work in public, share knowledge with their peers, and contribute to AFs research and lobbying activities. This will also enable students from the full range of London’s architecture schools to meet, learn from one another and collaborate.
Open to all, the first two events in the series took place on 24 November and 8 December in Kensington and provided young architects and housing developers with a platform to present their work in a public forum. Participants included architects Hugh Strange, Dyvik Kahlen, Roz Barr and Hesselbrand and developers Pocket, Igloo, Pegasus Life and Almacantar.
The central motivation in setting up this partnership for both the AF and the RCA, is an ambition to develop Kensington Gore as a vital site of exchange for another generation of emerging architects. As Ellis Woodman, Director of The Architecture Foundation, describes ‘since the second world war, the story of British architecture has been inextricably linked to a small number of venues that have provided young architects with a place to meet, socialise and exchange ideas. One such hub was The Bride of Denmark, the private pub founded in 1946 in the basement of the offices of The Architectural Review, that was a haunt of Summerson, Pevsner and many of the leading architects of the post-war era. Later, that role was taken by the bar of the Architectural Association, and later still by the 9H Gallery, the forerunner to the Architecture Foundation.’
Aspects of he AF/RCA programme will inform the development of an annual London Yearbook. The first edition of this critical survey of the city’s current development will be published in late 2017.
Dr Adrian Lahoud, Dean of Architecture, Royal College of Art said: 'I have been enormously impressed by the Architecture Foundation – they are a vital and critical voice, relentlessly testing all the conventions of cultural production in architecture. It is quite clear that the RCA and the AF share many of the same beliefs and commitments: we are behind a new generation of architects, we believe in the importance of architectural culture and both its social and political context, we are not afraid to take risks. I am personally very excited, this will offer our students an invaluable platform for public engagement and produce a new and much needed space for architectural discourse in London.'