Teaching Staff

Programme Director

Martin Self is an engineer and designer who has taught design and theory at the AA since 2004. He was a founder member of Arup’s Advanced Geometry Group, studied architectural theory at the AA, and has provided structural engineering and form-finding consultancy within practices such as Zaha Hadid Architects and Antony Gormley Studio. He was design team member and resident engineer for the award-winning self-sufficient Druk White Lotus School in Himalayan Ladakh. Trained originally in aerospace engineering, he worked at Ove Arup & Partners in a series of specialist and design roles over a ten-year period. With Charles Walker, he has led the design and production of the four AA Summer Pavilions (2006-2009) through tutorship of AA Intermediate Unit 2. Projects at AGU include collaborations with architects including OMA, UNStudio, Shigeru Ban and David Adjaye, and artists Anish Kapoor and Chris Ofili. He was responsible for the 2005 Serpentine Pavilion by Alvaro Siza & Eduardo Souto De Moura with Cecil Balmond, and the roof, at competition stage, of Pompidou Metz by Shigeru Ban.

Studio Masters

Piers Taylor is an architect, a founding partner of Mitchell Taylor Workshop, a Design Fellow at the University of Cambridge, the organiser of the annual Studio in the Woods, and sits on the South West Design Review Panel. Mitchell Taylor Workshop have won a number of awards for their work, and have been published extensively and internationally. He has been actively involved in progressive architectural education for a number of years, since studying in Australia with the Pritzker Prize winner Glenn Murcutt. He established  Studio in the Woods  in 2005, which is concerned with the testing of ideas through making at 1:1. Groups of architecture students work alongside practicing architects and using a constrained predetermined kit of parts spend several days building occupiable structures at 1:1 designed to expose, reveal, measure and describe an aspect of the landscape.  His own house, Moonshine, which was a self build timber framed project is constructed on a site with no car access, and was designed using components that had to be carried by hand along a woodland path. It addresses issues of a fragile woodland ecosystem and is the result of analysis of the water table, wind patterns, rainfall and sunlight. It won the AJ Small Projects Award in 2009. Mitchell Taylor Workshop have designed a large number of other innovative timber buildings, including Room 13, in Hartcliffe, Bristol – one of the most deprived parts of the UK, which is a purpose built community art studio designed using raw and unfinished materials which will patinate over time and reveal the occupancy of the users. It is designed to accommodate graffiti, spillage and life, and won 2 RIBA awards.

Stewart Dodd studied architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. On completion of his studies he worked for several architects across Europe prior to founding Satellite Architects Limited in 1995. Stewart is committed to creating exceptionally designed, economically viable buildings with a responsibility to the environment. Through this, he has remained a committed proponent for architectural education and has used his teaching career as a constant presence in the studio to encourage a conceptual discourse. Satellite Architects was founded in September 1995. Projects include The Cross in Kings Cross, the Jerwood Space in Southwark a space for the visual and performing arts, The Actors Centre in Covent Garden and the new River Cottage HQ in Devon (a fully sustainable development for cooking, eating, teaching and experiencing rural endeavours). The practice has won many awards and has twice been short listed for the Young Architect of the Year Award (YAYA).

Charley Brentnall, Make Tutor, has played a pivotal role in the renaissance of timber framing in the UK. He started a timber framing and vernacular buildings business in 1979 and founded Carpenter Oak & Woodland in 1987. He has over 30 years experience in timber construction and conservation, is a visiting lecturer at the Universities of Bath and York and a member of the Timber Framers Guild, Carpenters Fellowship, Icomos and SPAB. He is a past member of BWF British Standards committee. Since 2006 has run a private conservation, design and construction consultancy firm.

Kate Darby is an architect who has taught MArch at Bath University, ran an undergraduate unit at the Bartlett, and has been a visiting lecturer and critic at Cardiff, Cambridge, Westminster and London Metropolitan Universities, Oxford Brookes, the Bartlett and the AA. She is a founder member and team leader of Studio in the Woods. She worked for Gianni Botsford Architects and was project architect on Lighthouse, winner of RIBA and AIA awards. She founded KDA in 2008, a rural practice that is concerned with meaning and physicality of Architecture. The experience of architecture is developed by the practice through investigations into formal, material, and physical phenomena such as delicacy, complexity, emptiness, surprise and ambiguity.

Kostas Grigoriadis studied architecture at London Metropolitan University and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL followed by an MArch at the Architectural Association’s Design Research Laboratory. Work from his studies has been published in books and AD architecture magazine, while his Master’s thesis model was exhibited at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition 2009. Having previously worked at Foster + Partners in London, Kostas has co organized workshop No Man’s Land Project in Cyprus and has collaborated with leading academics in the field of digital design and making. He is experienced in parametric and code-based production and digital prototyping and fabrication.