Association of Architectural Educators (AAE) Project Offices Forum 2024

Description of Activity

This Forum, supported by the Association of Architectural Educators (AAE), brings together Project Offices in UK schools of architecture, and those with an interest in setting-up an office. Project Offices situate architectural practice in universities. Often sideways-on to mainstream practice, they often work pro-bono and typically provide commercial consultancy.

The first Project Offices operated in a handful of UK schools from the 1960s to the 1980s, typically linked to building science units, developing ideas from the RIBA’s 1958 Oxford Conference on architectural education. A second generation of Offices emerged in the 1990s and 2000s, this time in response university research assessment exercises. A third, contemporary generation of Offices is now producing innovative projects engaging clients, communities, research, students, sites, and novel design processes.

This event surveys the contemporary field, and compares opportunities, challenges, business models and recent work. What do Project Offices do? What are their distinctive contributions to universities and to architectural practice? How are Project Offices currently imagined? And how might they be re-imagined? The Forum aims to lead to an edited book surveying and celebrating the work of Project Offices in UK schools.

Period	10 Sept 2024
Event type	Conference
Location	Newcastle, United KingdomShow on map
Degree of Recognition	National