AL_A is the award-winning architecture studio founded in 2009 by the RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Amanda Levete with directors Ho-Yin Ng, Alice Dietsch and Maximiliano Arrocet.

Collaborating with ambitious and visionary clients, we develop designs that are conceptualised not just as buildings, but as urban propositions – projects that express the identity of an institution, a city or even a nation.

Recently completed projects include an undergraduate and outreach centre for Wadham College at the University of Oxford and a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s within the grounds of University College Hospital in Southampton.

In 2017, we completed the Exhibition Road Quarter at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. It is the museum’s largest building project in over 100 years, creating a new entrance, courtyard and exhibition gallery as well as conservation and logistics spaces serving the entire museum. In setting up a dialogue between museum and street, the new entrance courtyard has played an important civic role, attracting larger and more diverse audiences.

In October 2016, we celebrated the opening of MAAT, a new Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon. MAAT has captured the public’s imagination and shifted expectations of culture in the eyes of the city. This is due to a radical negotiation between building and public spaces that has promoted social inclusion. It is now one of the most visited museums in Portugal.

Central Embassy, opened to the public in 2017, is our largest project to date – a 1.5 million square foot shopping mall and hotel in Bangkok on the former grounds of the British Embassy. In 2016 we completed work on a 13-hectare media campus and 400,000 square foot HQ building for Sky in London.

Ongoing commissions include the expansion and redevelopment of Paisley Museum in Scotland and the design of the first prototype magnetised target fusion facility in the world for the Canadian clean energy firm General Fusion.

Self-generated projects are an essential part of our creative output. In 2014, we opened Tincan, the acclaimed pop-up restaurant in Soho without a kitchen that served only the very best tinned seafood. We are currently working on Pitch/Pitch, a stackable system of 5-a-side football pitches that addresses the lack of spaces for sport in cities.

We are at our best with clients whose ambition reaches beyond physicality, functionality and budget; those who want to move the game on. Our aim is to extend our clients’ ambitions for their projects through architectural invention. To realise a vision and create something truly transformative.