A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.
My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
Co-authored with Jon Goodbun, Michael Klein and Andreas Rumpfhuber. The main outcome of the Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment project. At the beginning of this project it became clear that there was no contemporary theory of scarcity that addressed the current conditions, so this book sets out to fill that gap, and then relate that theory to design. It is a short (15,000 words) book. Unfortunately the publishers are no longer running, so the link is to the full text as submitted to them in 2015.
This is my very short response to Paul Finch's comments on Extinction Rebellion that he made in the Architects Journal on 14th May and 21st May 2019
Chosen in open competition to curate the British Pavilion, I put together the best creative minds in Sheffield to present an echo of this wonderful city (the link takes you to my initial application, and I have to say the room data sheets are not bad). The team included: Ian Anderson, Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning, Encounters, Martyn Ware, and Jim Prevett. The show attempted to explain how a city is great beyond its buildings: it did not have much architecture in, which did not go down well with architects, especially those in London, who were doubly annoyed that a provincial academic was doing the show. But beyond the Clerkenwell goldfish bowl (with Ellis Woodman in particularly splenetic form, fortunately now behind a paywall), the exhibition was better received (i.e in Die Presse, Der Standard, Financial Times, The Architects Newspaper, The Times, The Yorkshire Post, and of course the Sheffield Telegraph)
2021-24 AHRC-DFG funded research project in collaboration with Tatjana Schneider, looking at the implications of climate breakdown for spatial practice. Summary of project in the link. We formed a research collective, MOULD, to do the project, and work coming from the project is gathered together at the website MOULD. One of the main outputs of the project is the website Architecture is Climate, a resource that reimagines the future of architecture through its entanglement with climate breakdown.
Not a lecture, but a podcast. The first episode from the new 'Architecture Academy' Podcast, set up and delivered by Marc Tuitt (who once was a student at Sheffield when I was Head of School). Under his wise questioning and sharp editing, I come across (though I say it myself) as sharp and focussed on some contemporary architectural issues (sexism, the profession, education and Brexit among them).
Not my musing, but that of my brother Nick Till. Nails the issues around Margaret Thatcher's funeral rather beautifully in two paragraphs
This was my first Zoom lecture, delivered as part of the Architecture Foundation's excellent 100 Day Studio intiative during the 2020 COVID lockdown. The video is here , and the transcript linked to the title above. The lecture speculates as to where architecture might be in the face of the twin crises of climate and COVID, arguing that these challenge some of the fundaments on which the modern project of architecture has based itself.
Funny how ideas formed so long ago still come up. But rather gauche nonetheless.
On the basis of a pitch written on an iPhone on the top of a mountain in Ethiopia, I was invited to curate the UK Pavilion at the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. The eventual pavilion was curated, designed and produced by students and staff from Central Saint Martins, and took the theme of Liquid Boundaries - arguing the need to find ways through the hardening of space as it is being increasingly controlled, regulated and divided. The pavilion presented four films, each 129 seconds long (the average time someone spends in a national pavilion at the Venice Biennale), which interpreted briefs provided by four UK architects and spatial agents. All in their own way open up ways in which boundaries might be negotiated with, and in so doing a more democratic form of space emerges. More information, including a downloadable pamphlet and 'user manual', can be found on the Liquid Boundaries website.
Early piece, written when I had just got Lefebvre. Introduces themes that I play on for years to come.
This is the text of a short talk I did as part of the UAL Climate Emergency Network 5 day festival in September 2020. It picks up on some of the themes of Architecture After Architecture
A short text written by our research collective MOULD as part of our pitch for the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale 2024. The text situates our research project Architecture is Climate as a parable.
Unpicking the differences between scarcity and austerity, the implications for the built environment. Good twitter feedback. Translated into French courtesy of the great journal Criticat. Pdf of translation here.
The keynote article for Architectural Review's 1500 issue. Draws heavily on the joint research with MOULD