About

About

To mark one hundred years of the Architectural Association in Bedford Square, the AA is celebrating the centenary of women in the school (1917-2017) with AA XX 100, a multi-media project linking a major exhibition, lectures, website, international conference and publications, including a collection of historical and critical writing about AA women.

At the AA General Meeting of 17 July 1917, a proposal was made to alter the bylaws to admit women as students. Four women were in the first intake of 1917-18. Today almost a century later, the intake is roughly 50/50 female/male students, although the profession itself remains unbalanced. Over the next three years, culminating in 2017, this multi-media project–AA XX 100– will represent the work of AA women, its graduates and teachers, who are among the most important architects and designers, educators and historians of the 20th-21st century, some celebrated, others unrecognised. Their work constitutes modern architecture at its best, stretching from Elisabeth Scott’s mould-breaking Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford (now the RSC) to Zaha Hadid’s inimitable, dynamic MAXXI; from Mary Medd’s (née Crowley) school building to Patty Hopkin’s rich but elegantly restrained Glyndebourne Opera; from the social activism and people-oriented architecture of the inter-war generation of Judith Ledeboer and Justin Blanco White to the late twentieth-century praxis of Matrix; from Norah Aiton & Betty Scott’s early industrial modernism in the 1930s to Julia Barfield’s landmark, London Eye. Their work and lives have transformed the architectural landscape, yet these women remain for the most part out of mainstream design history, education and research.