My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
A long piece on Trump-Brexit-Architecture. I was nervous doing it because I thought everything had been said, but thought there was an urgency, so any contribution felt worthwhile.
The keynote article for Architectural Review's 1500 issue. Draws heavily on the joint research with MOULD
Not my musing, but that of my brother Nick Till. Nails the issues around Margaret Thatcher's funeral rather beautifully in two paragraphs
For Occupied Times, the journal of the occupation movement. On austerity contra scarcity
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.
A short piece written in 2012 for the RIBA Building Futures series on the future of architectural education and the profession. More bullish than I now feel.
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.
A lecture on architectural education that I presented at The Agency Conference in Sydney in 2017, Yale Symposium on Rebuilding Architecture in 2018, and as part of the Bartlett International Lecture Series in 2018. It starts with the premise that architectural education is inherently conservative, and then spins out the argument from that uncomfortable start. The video link is from the Bartlett version. It did not go down universally well...
A bit of a cheat, because it is really the second chapter of Architecture Depends
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.
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.
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.
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
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
A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.
An essay on live projects written for a collection edited by Mel Dood and others from RMIT in Melbourne.