Sticky opening (I was reading Kant at the time) but better later on issues of time in architecture.
Thoughts on the London riots. I think good.
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)
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, and good value.
My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
A lecture as part of the brilliant Architecture and Labour lecture series and symposium organised by Mel Dodd and the Spatial Practices team at Central Saint Martins, in association with Olly Wainwright. A properly writtten version of the lecture appears as a book chapter in The Competition Grid. I have pasted the raw text in the link, and this is the link to the video of the lecture. My lecture starts at 54.30, but it is very worth watching Peggy Deamer first.
Short piece on Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio, trying to find the line between adulation and critique.
The best essay on the building and meaning of our house, with stories.
Very early thoughts from our Scarcity and Creativity project. Now looks rather crude.
On Park Hill as an example of welfare architecture and its current demise. My first foray into the work of Zygmunt Bauman.
Working with colleagues at the University of Sheffield School of Architecture, most notably Prue Chiles and Carolyn Butterworth, we established the most developed live projects programme in the country, probably the world, with some truly wondrous results. For example, look at the final report (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) from a group of students that I supervised looking at the use of urine to make mud bricks in Darfur. It is remarkable what they achieved in six weeks - should be awarded a PhD for this alone IMHO.
Second of two, with some hints as to how to achieve flexible housing, much more developed in the book.
An obituary written for the Architectural Review and Architects Journal, just a few days after the tragic loss of PBJ.
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.
A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.
More or less what it says on the tin — facts that were correct in early 2012.
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.