Dezeen School Shows: a proposal that examines London's failed new-build housing blocks is among the student projects by the Architectural Association.

Also featured is a research project that examines the "idle urbanisation" of France's Etang de Berre territory and a proposal for a data-driven public asset for London's Nine Elms Station.

Architectural Association

School: Architectural Association
Diploma Units: 10, 20, 17, 7, 14

School statement:

"Diploma with Honours is the highest award a student can receive upon completion of the Diploma Programme at the Architectural Association (AA).

"Fifth Year students are nominated at the end of each academic year based on their final presentations for assessment, which convince the diploma tutors of the value, relevance and premise of their project.

"Five students were awarded a Diploma with Honours for the 2025 to 2026 academic year, including Jay E Chew, Changjin Kweon, Ruby Amelia Neal, Sacha Trouiller and Jing Yun Zhou.

"The winning projects will be exhibited in the AA Bar on the first floor of 36 Bedford Square in London from 20 June to 11 July as part of Projects Review 2026, the AA's end-of-year exhibition of work by students across the school."

Pulse Logic: Closing the Loop, Collective Urban Data as Public Architecture by Changjin Kweon

"Pulse Logic proposes a data-driven public asset for Nine Elms Station, where collective urban data is returned to the public through architecture rather than used to control public life from above.

"Transport predictions, crowd density and environmental conditions are translated into visible spatial states: openings, light, ventilation and shared waiting areas.

"By reading the building, people can wait, move, gather or invent their own responses. This is the project's approach to 'closing the loop' – public behaviour changes the architectural state, and that altered state becomes a new civic signal, transforming infrastructure into a responsive, legible and publicly accountable urban commons at scale."

Student: Changjin Kweon
Diploma Unit: 10

Marking the Land: Practicing Territory Across the Kelabit Highlands by Jay Chew

"Marking the Land investigates territory as a practice rather than a condition of ownership within the Kelabit Highlands of Sarawak, Malaysia.

"Historically, land was understood not as property, but claimed through continual acts of occupation, cultivation and mark-making. 'To own the land was to work on it.'

"Today, this understanding of territory exists in tension with state land regimes that recognise indigenous rights only as historical conditions.

"The project asks how architecture might operate as a territorial practice outside the legal frameworks of the state. It proposes a network of architectural markers across the highlands that are collectively constructed, maintained and rebuilt, enabling territoriality to be continually practised over time."

Student: Jay Chew
Diploma Unit: 20

The Smoke of the Earth: Re-Framing The Anxious Landscape by Ruby Neal

"The Smoke of the Earth explores theatre as a spatial and social condition in the fragmented post-industrial landscape of Stoke-on-Trent.

"Set within a terrain shaped by extraction and subsidence, the project proposes a non-hierarchical performance space where intuition, movement and shared encounter take centre stage.

"Visitors become both spectators and protagonists, guided by drifting sound and shifting light through porous, chamfered rammed earth walls.

"The walls are made from earth excavated directly on site, already mixed with mine spoil and blast furnace slag, which provides natural stabilisation.

"The charcoal from old ovens gives the surfaces a deep, tonal presence, turning industrial archaeology into visible structure. In this way, the building grows out of the ground itself, offering flexible spaces where rehearsal, performance and everyday life overlap, creating the conditions for collective reorientation in the present."

Student: Ruby Neal
Diploma Unit: 17

Peripheral Sea: The Idle Territory of Berre by Sacha Trouiller

"This work investigates forms of domestic and landscape infrastructure as a continuation of research embracing the idle urbanisation of France's Etang de Berre territory.

"Unfolding in two interventions, located at the edge of both the urban spread and the water, the project addresses both the urgencies of housing shortage and landscape destruction in the region.

"Both designs, while remaining specific to their sites, are in some sense extraneous to them. They refer, obliquely, to the entirety of the Berre territory and the monumental infrastructures that constructed it.

"They can be seen as acts of collimation, to alter even slightly the way the Berre Sea and its architecture are perceived. Fundamentally, they seek to question the meaning of place in a peripheral setting; not to resolve it, but to generate other levels of existence within it."

Student: Sacha Trouiller
Diploma Unit:  7

Hot Assets: A Radical Retrofit of London's Failed New-build Housing Blocks by Jing Yun Zhou

"Contemporary London housing has been engineered into a 'hot asset' – a financialised machine which is optimised for capital accumulation but produces a pattern of physical failure, where overheating and social isolation are built into the architecture itself.

"This project proposes the radical retrofit of London's failed new-build housing blocks, linking thermal repair to resident agency.

"The brick-clad facade is cut, opened and extended for social ends. Holes are cut to ventilate the core. The thermal line is reorganised into a series of habitable spaces that filter air, shade and heat. Windowless corridors give way to occupiable shared space and encounter."

Student: Jing Yun Zhou
Diploma Unit: 14

Partnership content

This school show is a partnership between Dezeen and the Architectural Association. Find out more about Dezeen partnership content here.