AAI Lecture: UCD Urban Design Masterclass – Kay Hughes

The AAI is delighted to present the 2025 UCD Urban Design Masterclass Lecture by Kay Hughes, kindly sponsored by Henry J Lyons Architects.

Kay Hughes is the former Design Director at HS2, where she led a multidisciplinary team to deliver the project's Design Vision. With extensive experience in architecture, urban design, placemaking, and infrastructure, she has held senior roles at the London 2012 Olympics, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and Sport England.

Kay has chaired numerous design review panels and is a member of the NIC CamOx competition winning VeloCity placemaking team. She also serves as a Board Member of the Major Project Association. Passionate about design in infrastructure, Kay believes in its potential to achieve social, economic, and environmental benefits. She studied Architecture and later in her career Infrastructure, Investment, and Finance at UCL.

The quality of infrastructure design is pivotal to the success of delivering many of the future challenges of growing populations & climate change that are efficient, useable and beneficial for the communities and individuals they serve.

The talk will focus on the remarkable transformations in the scale and nature of placemaking and design from local to global during Kay's career, using examples from her work.