AA Archives: Projects, Personalities, Publics is a rare opportunity to appreciate material from the AA Archive, showcasing the evolution of the Diploma School, the characters that have inhabited it and providing glimpses of AA life over the last one hundred years. Opening on 17th February, the exhibition in the AA Gallery features many celebrated and influential AA projects, with schemes including the legendary Tomorrow Town (a pioneering modernist town planning scheme from 1937-8), together with a 16mm stop motion film shot by Sir Nicholas Grimshaw in 1965 for his diploma project, and many other student projects by alumni including Sir David Chipperfield, Tony Fretton, Piers Gough and Sir Jeremy Dixon. Alongside are exhibited models, posters and ephemera which encompass student life and membership activities at the AA since the 1920s including the annual AA pantomime and Carnival. In addition, two sound booths also allow visitors access to an oral history of the school and which include firsthand accounts of famous figures such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Mies van der Rohe and Berthold Lubetkin visiting the AA. These insightful accounts shed light on what it must have been like to be at the AA during that period. The interviews, taken from the series Architect’s Lives, are reproduced with the permission of the British Library and are extracts from nearly 100 life story interviews recorded for National Life Stories (www.bl.uk/nls). Two entertaining excerpts from this collection are featured below. Robert Maguire on Frank Lloyd Wright’s 1950 visit to the AA On the final day, he [Frank Lloyd Wright] gave prizes to the AA students. I had a travelling studentship in my final year so I had to go up and shake hands with the great man in this big marquee in Bedford Square. He gave a talk to us all which was based on something he had written, which is, I think, in his autobiography. He was against people who won competitions. He never went in for competitions because the people who judged competitions shouldn’t be judging competitions; they should be building things themselves, so they were average architects. And people who went in for competitions, ought to be winning commissions so they were only average architects and so on. He ended up saying that the winner of a competition is an average of an average of an average. He applied this to his speech to the prize-winners about how people who taught architecture ought to be doing it instead of teaching it so they were average and students who won prizes and so on... I’ve forgotten exactly how he put it together. When each of us went up to shake hands with the great man and receive our
piece of paper, he said, ‘an average of an average of an average’ – looking us each in the eye, it really took us down a peg... Robert Maguire, interviewed by Linda Sandino, 2004, Architect’s Lives, British Library Sound Archive reference: C467/79/01-10 Tape 10 Side B Denis Clarke-Hall on Mies van der Rohe at the AA I was President of the AA. Mies was coming over to England for the Gold Medal. So I said to Alexander, who was Secretary of the AA at that time, ‘Write to his secretary and see if we can get him to come along to talk to the students’. It was a wonderful opportunity and he was only over here for a short time. She wrote back and said, ‘Terribly sorry, but he is fully booked up and won’t be able to manage it’. So I said, ‘to hell with this’ and I got a bit of AA notepaper and I wrote in my own handwriting: ‘Dear Mies, We would simply love you to come and meet our students who are longing to meet you. We have an informal dinner every Thursday and if you could possibly fit it into your itinerary, I will introduce you to the students’. A letter came back from him, not his secretary, saying ‘Delighted’. I knew he liked his drink so I got Alex to ring up his secretary and say, ‘What is Mies’s favourite drink?’ So we got his cocktails and his favourite German wine. When he came to this dinner, he came into the AA and I received him and took him up into the Front Members’ Room, which was a very comfortable room with armchairs, in those days. I sat him down and introduced him to the chairman of the student’s committee and a few other students and left him to it. I saw that he got a drink and I saw his reaction because a girl came along with a tray full of all sorts of drinks like that and said ‘What would you have?’ And he said, ‘What are these?’ And she said, ‘Well that is so and so which I believe you like’ and he said, ‘Ah!’ And he grabbed it and knocked it back, grabbed about three more and knocked them back... Denis Clarke Hall, interviewed by Louise Brodie, 1997, Architects’ Lives, British Library Sound Archive reference: C467/23 tape 2 side A (available on Archival Sound Recordings as part 3 of the interview) Manijeh Verghese is a Fourth Year AA Student and Student Editor of AArchitecture AA Archives Exhibition, 17 February–26 March 2011, AA Gallery
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