The Architecture Association School, the world's most renowned and influential school of architecture, has been awarded its largest ever single gift in the form of a living legacy, generously given by the family of Norah Garlick, in the name of Norah's parents, Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford. The gift will go towards the development of Hooke Park, the AA's Dorset-based campus and working woodland, which it has owned since 2003. The Bequest will enable the AA School to begin work on its vision of turning Hooke Park into the UK's first campus dedicated to returning contemporary architecture to a hand-on, experimental approach of alternative and ecologically-sustainable design and building.

Set within a 350-acre working forest in Dorset, Hooke Park is a renowned educational setting with a long history of experimental design and building. At the centre of the estate is the UK's only realised building by the RIBA Gold Medalist Frei Otto, a large-scale workshop used in recent years for the fabrication and assembly of the AA's well-known summer pavilion projects. Also already on site are prototype buildings by Ahrends, Burton Koralek and another RIBA Gold Medalist and AA Graduate, Edward Cullinan. The Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest coincides with the launch of a new phase of educational activity and building that will realise a new campus of a dozen or more small-scale, alternative wood construction prototype buildings, to be designed and built by AA staff and students.

In Autumn 2010 students, staff and consultants of the AA's new Design & Make graduate course will combine the global experience and talent of the world's most international architectural school with that of local craftspeople, whose wood-working, building, boat-making and other skills, to create a unique new setting for architectural education. The AA's strategic plan for the development has been undertaken during the past two years in consultation with West Dorset Council, local community and a team of outside professionals, whose work have been guided by the AA's Hooke Advisory Group. In Spring 2010 West Dorset Council granted the AA outline planning consent for proceeding with the project, while the school completed the curriculum design and received a first group of applications by students from throughout the UK and overseas for the new academic programme, which will grant a Masters of Architecture degree.

The AA continues to seek additional funds to meet the needs of the plan over the next six or more years of a master plan that envisions a series of annual, small-scale wood prototype buildings that will provide accommodation, teaching, workshop and other learning facilities for the AA, visitors and participants in its Public Programme events. Early educational and building costs associated with the project will be met by the generous gift given by the family of Norah Garlick, the largest-ever single gift given to the AA in its 162-year history.

Brett Steele, Director of the AA School of Architecture, said: “We are enormously grateful to Norah Garlick and her family, who shares our vision of a woodland campus dedicated to fostering a re-connection between hand-on design and construction cultures as a path forward towards new ways of thinking, working and building. The Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest is an unprecedented commitment to not only the AA, for which we are deeply appreciative, but also demonstrates great optimism in our open experimentation with not only new kinds of architecture, but as well, new forms of teaching and learning.”

Find out more about Hooke Park at AA School's website: http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/AALIFE/HOOKEPARK/hooke.php

Press information • Press releases and high resolution images can be downloaded from http://www.kallaway.co.uk/architectural-association-school.htm • For further information please contact Will Kallaway: 020 7221 7883 / william.kallaway@kallaway.com

Notes to Editors

The Architecture Association School is the world's most renowned international and influential school of architecture. Since 1847 it has pioneered a belief in architecture as profession, culture and form of human enquiry and is credited with fostering the creation of worldwide leaders of architecture.

AA School alumni include architectural leaders Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Lord Rogers, Will Alsop and many others. Through its unique, year-long, unit based system of teaching, direct intervention in cities and its intensively collaborative team based approach to learning, the school brings together disconnected worlds, fresh ideas and inspiring insights. The AA School is celebrated worldwide as an imaginative setting for architectural culture.

The Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest to the Architectural Association, Inc. This gift has been made by Mrs. Norah Evelyn Garlick of shares she owned as a former director of Stepnell Estates Ltd., a property company originally started by her father Horace Wakeford of Daventry, Northhamptonshire in 1946.

The bequest is in the name of Norah Garlick's parents, Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford. Horace, born in 1880, was the son of an architect who practised in Reading. He was a Building Surveyor who had some training as an architect. In 1906 he married Ellen Bosworth and a year later joined his father in law as a partner in his building company in Daventry that became Bosworth and Wakeford. He developed this small local business to one that acquired a reputation in Northamptonshire and Warwickshire for the high quality of its work achieved largely using the skills of in-house trained craftsmen. The company became the builder of choice for prominent architects such as Edwin Lutyens. Ellen Wakeford instigated a welfare and benefit fund for the Company's employees and families, and encouraged the education of local children through apprenticeship schemes. She is remembered in Daventry by the construction of a porch at the parish church of Holy Cross.

The transfer of shares to the AA has been made possible by Norah Garlick's family, her son and daughter, her grand children and by 2 generations of her Wakeford nephews who now manage Stepnell Ltd., the construction company that grew out of the business originally begun by Horace Wakeford.

The family believe that Ellen and Horace would approve the selection of the AA's new Design+Make programme at Hooke Park because of it's commitment to education, welfare, quality and innovation in building.

The Design & Make course is a 16-month Master of Architecture programme that is starting in Autumn 2010. Led by Programme Director Martin Self (who, with Charles Walker, led the AA Summer Pavilion projects) and Studio Master Piers Taylor (of Mitchell Taylor Workshop and founder of Studio in the Woods), the programme is open to post-graduate students of architecture who wish to pursue studio- and workshop-based design and realisation of alternative rural architectures. Applicants are currently being sought. Further details are available at: www.aaschool.ac.uk/designandmake

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