My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
My longest piece on architectural education. Finalist in EAAE competition. Maybe should have won, but the judges, Perez-Gomez and Palaasma, rose to my bait of inauthentic phenomenology and sulked.
Another lecture from the Architecture after Architecture project, given to the Australian ArchiTeam conference. Lovely introduction from Michael Smith but the rest of the audience seemed either outraged or nonplussed or CPD-points-collecting at my rather intemperate take on the future of architecture
Edited text of an interview with me about participation done with Bernd Upmeyer of the Dutch journal MONU
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.
Short foreword to a big collection of essays about, well, architecture and social engagement. This was written in the dog days of Brexit and Trump, so comes across as quite fluently pissed off. It captures in a short text what I have been ruminating on for a few years.
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.
A further explanation of my 30% pledge, which seems to have raised debate (see comments) elsewhere on the very wonderful Parlour website.
A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.
Article for The Conversation critiquing the reductive way that things are chosen for the Designs of the Year exhibition.
An interview with the portuguese journal arqa. In portuguese, so translation below. On scarcity, politics and the need for alternatives. Done the day of Thatcher's funeral, so pretty gloomy.
This was a comment on the UK Government's White Paper on Higher Education from 2011. Corrects a few myths.
A short piece that I wrote in 2010 for the Architects Journal about end-of-year architecture shows. Some rather paranoid architectural tutors at Westminster (where I was then Dean) saw this as an attack on them personally, and so excommunicated me forthwith. In fact it was nothing to do with them but rather a concern about the general direction of architectural education as manifested through the exhibition.
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
With Tatjana Schneider. A comprehensive survey of Flexible Housing design. Winner 2007 RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University based research, with judges saying: ‘An exemplary body of architecturally-relevant research’ offering comparative design plans, well-researched historical referencing, a new classification system and a practical manual/tool kit. An innovative and brave approach?? There is a long and useful, if quite critical, review by John Habraken (who is one of the book’s heroes). The book is beautifully designed by Ben Weaver, who also did Spatial Agency book and Architecture & Participation. The link is to an almost final version of the pdf of the book.
For Occupied Times, the journal of the occupation movement. On austerity contra scarcity
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