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.
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.
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.
Early stuff on research and first ideas on contingency. Others like this more than I do. Big in China.
Short piece on Samuel Mockbee and the Rural Studio, trying to find the line between adulation and critique.
Really just a transcription of a lecture — ideas on housing, the everyday and occupation over form.
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.
Edited with Sarah Wigglesworth. Now all this stuff appears, well, everyday but back then it was quite original. Buying it is a problem because the publishers discontinued it, but there are some sellers out there in the US. Essays and work by, among others, Sam Mockbee (of Rural Studio, his only published writing, of which we are proud to have persuaded him to do), Greil Marcus, Niall McLaughlin and Michael Marriott.
My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
Text of my talk as part of the celebration of PBJ's life held at the University of Sheffield, 16th November 2016
Retrofit under conditions of scarcity. Pdf of presentation is here. Background to day here
For Occupied Times, the journal of the occupation movement. On austerity contra scarcity
A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.
On Park Hill as an example of welfare architecture and its current demise. My first foray into the work of Zygmunt Bauman.
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.