Brett Steele
Brett Steele (UK) is the Director of Architectural Association.
Brett Steele [© Valerie Bennet]
Brett Steele is the director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture and AA Publications in London. He is the founder and previous director of the AADRL Design Research Laboratory, a collaborative and network-based M.Arch program at AA.
Steele's interests include contemporary architecture and cities, architectural culture, and the impact of new media and today’s network-based distributed design and communication systems on architectural education.
In 2001, he taught a course on Brandspace: Increasingly, architectural space operates as if an image; a media product, an entertainment vehicle. Produced, maintained, circulated and exchanged as a commodity – micro-designed with a molecular precision to create highly specific "experiences," emotional responses on the part of those who confront its smooth surfaces. Accordingly, architects’ current design theories have come to be aligned, more than ever, with strategies associated with other forms of product design, placement and packaging.
Brett Steele has taught and lectured worldwide, and has published widely: he is the editor of Negotiate My Boundary (2002), Corporate Fields (2005), D[R]L Research (2005), and Supercritical (2008). He edits the Series AA Words: Critical Thinking in Contemporary Architecture, and AA Agendas. Steele's articles, interviews & lectures have appeared in numerous specialized and general media. For the 2002 V2_ publication TransUrbanism, he published the essay Transitory Image Spaces: Urbanism 2.0.
