Climate Matters Week 2025

A week of activities by students and invited guests at the AA School of Architecture.

Climate Matters Week is a festival of events and activities at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture bringing together students, staff and invited guests to explore architectural ideas and responses to ongoing climatic and ecological changes worldwide. The week-long programme of public lectures will bring the school and its wider community together to disseminate knowledge, share concerns and empower students to effect change. The ambition is to promote awareness of the work being done within the AA community to address the climate emergency, and to highlight the social and cultural impacts of climate change across a range of temporal and spatial scales. The festival will encourage students to imagine new architectures that tread more lightly on the earth and are adaptive to a changing world.

SCHEDULE

Monday 27 October
1-2.30pm - Michael Weinstock, Despatches from the Future, AA Lecture Hall

Tuesday 28 October
10am-2pm - Calibrating Planetary Sensibility through GIS and Earth Observation, with Sheer Gritzerstein. Student workshop in 33FFB.

2-5pm - Rhino.Ecologic: Introducing a New Ecological Simulation Framework for Rhino/Grasshopper, with Verena Vogler (R&D lead Rhino Europe). Student workshop in 33FFB.

6.30-8pm - Theodore Spyropoulos, Phenomenon as Technology, AA Lecture Hall

Wednesday 29 October
10am-5pm - How to write a Manifesto for Visions of the Future, with Alvaro Velasco Perez. Student workshop in 33FFB.

10am-5pm - Evolving landscapes, with Eduardo Rico-Carranza. Student workshop in 33FFF.

6.30-8pm - Xavier De Kestelier, Architecture at the Edge: Regenerative Design from Bidi Bidi to the Moon, AA Lecture Hall

Thursday 30 October
10am-5pm - Archaic Futures with Anna Font and Vid Znidarsic. Student workshop in the Front Members' Room.

6.30-8pm - Mina Hasman, Building for Planetary Renewal, AA Lecture Hall

Friday 31 October
10-12.30pm, 1-3.30pm, 4-6.30pm - Visions of the Future
Short presentations by AA Students in the Front Members' Room and Bar

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Xavier De Kestelier is an architect and design innovator, and a Head of Design at Hassell. With over two decades of experience, he leads in computational design, digital fabrication, and additive manufacturing, pioneering projects across architecture and extreme environments. A trailblazer in space architecture, he has collaborated with NASA and ESA on sustainable space habitats. His expertise in parametric design and digital construction drives industry innovation and research. Formerly Director of Smartgeometry, he helped build a global network in computational design. Xavier has also taught at Syracuse University (London), the University of Ghent, and The Bartlett (London), mentoring the next generation of architects. His socially impactful work includes leading the design of the Bidi Bidi Performing Arts Centre in one of the world's largest refugee settlements.

Mina Hasman leads SOM’s sustainability and wellbeing daily operations and long-term vision and strategy. She oversees the firm’s progress on climate action, as it pertains to its global business operations and projects. With her team, she pioneered SOM’s ‘Whole Life Carbon Accounting’ service, which offers assessment of a building’s carbon emissions through its construction/renovation and lifetime. In her leadership, SOM became the largest, Science Based Target Initiative (SBTi) validated design-engineering firm in the world and achieved carbon neutrality.

Theodore Spyropoulos is an architect and educator. He is the Director of the Architectural Association’s world-renowned Design Research Lab (AADRL) in London and a resident artist at Somerset House. He previously chaired the AA Graduate School, and was a Professor of Architecture at the Staedelschule in Frankfurt and a visiting Research Fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. He co-founded the experimental art, architecture, and design practice Minimaforms with Stephen Spyropoulos. The work of Minimaforms has been acquired by international art and architecture collections, including the FRAC Centre, the Signum Foundation, and the M+ Archigram Archive. His work has been exhibited at MOMA (NYC), the Barbican Centre, the Onassis Cultural Centre, Somerset House, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Leonardo da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology, and the ICA. He previously worked for the offices of Peter Eisenman and Zaha Hadid. In 2013, the Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture awarded him the ACADIA Award of Excellence for his educational work directing the AADRL. He has been published internationally and is the author of Adaptive Ecologies: Correlated Systems of Living (2013), Enabling (2010), and the forthcoming publications Quantum (2025) and Elemental: Phenomena as Technology (2026).

Michael Weinstock is an architect, Head of Research at the AA and Founding Director of the Emergent Technologies and Design taught postgraduate programme. He studied architecture at the AA and has taught at the school since 1989 in a range of positions. Over decades his published work has arisen from research into the dynamics, forms and energy transactions of natural systems, and the application of the mathematics and processes of emergence to architecture. He has published and lectured widely and has been an academic leader in bringing awareness and understanding of the natural and human dynamics that are currently driving changes in all the systems of nature and civilisation.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk