From 22nd February to 18th March 2008, The Architectural Association in London present DRL TEN.

DRL actually stands for Design Research Lab, a research unit started at the AA in 1997. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of DRL, the AA have decide to organise an exhibition, build a temporary pavilion in Bedford Square, and publish DRL TEN: A Design Research Compendium.

The pavilion, designed by DRL graduates Alan Dempsey and Alvin Huang is not yet ready. Its opening is announced for Friday 29th of February Thursday 13th of March (6.30pm – 8.30pm) while the show at the AA gallery opened yesterday night.

The book will be launch Thursday 13th of March (6pm-8pm) and will documents the activities of the DRL from 1997 to 2007.

The exhibition DRL Ten is featuring ten years of work by the DRL’S staff and former students. The coordinators of DRL TEN invited a group of selected graduates of the program (called the ‘Young Punks’) to present their work since graduation. Some of them have now started their own offices, while others are working for some of the big starchitects (Zaha Hadid Architects, Future Systems, OMA, and so forth).

Yesterday’s opening at 36 Bedford Square was painfully congested: Visitors had to queue for about twenty minutes in order to enter the exhibition, as the ‘one in, one out’ rule seemed to be of primary importance for the DRL TEN’s organizers.