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.