AL_A

AL_A is the award-winning architecture and design studio founded by the RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Amanda Levete CBE with Directors Ho-Yin Ng, Alice Dietsch and Maximiliano Arrocet. Since its formation in 2009, AL_A has refined an intuitive and strategic approach to design. Collaborating with ambitious and visionary clients, we develop designs that are conceptualised as urban projects not just buildings and projects that express the identity of an institution, a city or a nation. The practice won the competition to design and implement the expansion of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2011. Opening to the public in June 2017, the V&A Exhibition Road Quarter saw AL_A realise a new entrance for the V&A featuring the world’s first porcelain courtyard, covered in 11,000 handmade tiles above a new 1,100m2 gallery to house headline temporary exhibitions. The project was the V&A’s largest building project in over 100 years and completed while the museum remained open to the public. In October 2016 the practice celebrated the opening of MAAT, a new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, commissioned by EDP, one of the world’s foremost energy companies. Recently completed projects include Central Embassy (2017), a 1.5 million sq ft luxury shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok on the former grounds of the British Embassy, a 13-hectare media campus and a 37,700m2 headquarters building for Sky (2016) in London, and MPavilion 2015 in Melbourne. Ongoing commissions around the world include the transformation of the flagship Galleries Lafayette department store on Boulevard Haussmann in Paris; a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s in Southampton; two new buildings for Wadham College at the University of Oxford; The Courtyard, a series of community mixed-use developments on 39 sites across Moscow; and the Monte St Angelo subway station in Naples. Past clients include News Corporation, Condé Nast, Goldman Sachs, Comme des Garçons, Dublin Docklands, Selfridges and the Marylebone Cricket Club. AL_A is engaged in long-running research into the application of new materials and techniques in architecture and design. In 2015 the practice’s ceramic table, made using technologies adapted from the space industry, was selected by Edmund de Waal for inclusion in his white exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. AL_A sees self-generated projects as an essential element of its creative output. In 2014, the practice opened Tincan, an acclaimed pop-up restaurant in London’s Soho that served only the best tinned seafood. The studio is currently working on Pitch/Pitch, a stackable system of 5-a-side football pitches to address the lack of spaces for sport in cities. In every project, however modest in scale, AL_A try to advance the debate, be it analytical response, social purpose, manufacturing technique or material innovation.