AA Approaches is a publication series that places debate at the center of architectural education. Architects, practitioners, students and theorists share their ideas on how urgent issues that we are faced with can be examined and rethought within spaces of education. At a societal moment characterized by rapid change and urgent global challenges, the ways we teach, the methodologies we explore and the work that emerges from these approaches can all have an immediate impact on our built environment. The first publication in this series will focus on 'stories' and how we discuss, narrate and visualize the complexities of a given condition. The counterfactual, or the projected future scenario, is an important strand of architectural education and practice that is due for reappraisal. The interaction of fact and fiction can champion architecture as a form of cultural production whilst retaining its critical framework. Yet in addition to the story, the media through which we communicate architectural ideas and the value of this representation - the film, the drawing, the image, mixed reality and more - can confront, dissolve and restructure standard drawing practices. The imaginative exploration of possibility, conducted with rigour and care, might be exactly what architecture needs to be right now.
