Arch. MAXIMILIANO ARROCET

MAAT museum

Jury member at WAN AWARDS 2014 – METAL IN ARCHITECTURE
RIBA STIRLING PRIZE AWARD

Max Arrocet was made a director of AL_A in 2012 having joined the office in 2007. He is leading the design of the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, the Maggie’s Centre in Southampton and the project for the reception and conference centre of Goldman Sachs’s new London headquarters. Max also leads a number of private residential projects and has an expertise in bespoke contemporary and historic detailing.

Max studied at the University of Bath and Westminster University, and has a strong understanding of construction techniques and materiality. His background in engineering and multidisciplinary approach is reflected in projects at all scales, from complex building schemes to groundbreaking installations.
AL_A is the award-winning architecture and design studio founded in 2009 by the RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Amanda Levete with Directors Ho-Yin Ng, Alice Dietsch and Maximiliano Arrocet.
AL_A’s approach to design balances the intuitive with the strategic, drawing on a foundation of rigorous research, innovation, collaboration and painstaking attention to detail.

The practice won the competition to design and implement the highly anticipated expansion of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. On completion in 2017 the V&A project will see AL_A realise a new entrance for the V&A, with the world’s first porcelain courtyard above a new underground gallery housing spaces for headline exhibitions. The project will be the V&A’s largest expansion in over 100 years and will be completed while the museum remains open to the public.

Ongoing commissions around the world include the remodelling of Galeries Lafayette Haussmann in Paris; Central Embassy, a 1.5 million sq ft mixed-use development on the former grounds of the British embassy in Bangkok; the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology in Lisbon, commissioned by EDP, one of the world’s foremost energy companies; the 2015 MPavilion, a public pavilion for the Naomi Milgrom Foundation in the Queen Victoria Gardens, Melbourne; a new centre for the cancer care charity Maggie’s in Southampton; The Courtyard, a series of community mixed-use developments on 39 sites across Moscow; and the World Trade Center Mosque in Abu Dhabi.

Past clients include Sky, News Corporation, Condé Nast, Goldman Sachs, the City of Naples Subway, Dublin Docklands, Selfridges, and the Marylebone Cricket Club.

AL_A is engaged in long-running research into the application of new materials and techniques in architecture and design. In 2015 the practice’s ceramic table, made using technologies adapted from the space industry, was selected by Edmund de Waal for inclusion in his white exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

AL_A sees self-generated projects as an essential element of its creative output. In 2014, the practice opened tincan, an acclaimed pop-up restaurant in London’s Soho that served only the best tinned seafood.

In every project, however modest in scale, AL_A try to advance the debate, be it analytical response, social purpose, manufacturing technique or material innovation.