Architectural Association School of Architecture
aaschool.ac.ukA platform that makes a complex, experimental school legible.
- Launched a comprehensive new institutional platform
- Six distinct areas of the site, each with its own visual identity
- A three-tier programmes hierarchy covering nine programmes and 30+ individual units
- Information architecture and UX strategy
- Design system
- Editorial publishing system (ROAM)
- Website engineering and CMS implementation
The AA operates across many distinct areas — academic programmes, public events, a bookshop, a woodland campus in Dorset, an archival research section, and a large global community. Our task was to design an information architecture and visual system that could serve students, prospective applicants, members, alumni, and the general public — all with meaningfully different needs — without feeling fragmented or generic.
The central website serves as the connective tissue for everything. The homepage is split into two distinct halves: academic programmes and admissions on one side, and public culture, events, and content on the other. An integrated CMS pulls content from all sections of the site — DTA, ROAM, Hooke Park, and the Bookshop — surfacing it contextually throughout the experience.
The AA runs nine programmes, each made up of dozens of design units with their own tutors, briefs, and identities....
The DTA archive documents the work of the AA’s Department of Tropical Studies, established in 1953, whose director Otto Koenigsberger produced 52 boxes of drawings, photographs, and planning reports on architecture across the Global South. We designed a dedicated archival site with a sophisticated, information-dense visual language — “HTML chic,” in our words — that foregrounds the unique intersection of digital medium and modernist history.
Hooke Park is the AA’s 150-hectare working forest in Dorset — an educational campus focused on design, construction, and landscape. Its section of the site needed to feel distinct enough to reflect its experimental, hands-on character (what the Hooke Park team described as a “pirate utopia”) while maintaining its connection to the broader AA identity. We developed a dedicated information architecture and gave the Hooke Park team independent publishing permissions.
Publishing is central to the AA’s identity. The bookshop runs on WooCommerce/WordPress with a custom theme built on the AA design system. Shop modules are embedded throughout the main site, allowing readers to move seamlessly from an article in ROAM to purchasing a related book.