"Continue to contaminate your bed, and one day you will suffocate in your own waste" Duwamish chief Seattle to Pres… https://t.co/qTXguYJazz

Flexible Housing: 2007: Architectural Press

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.

Alternate Currents: Introduction (with Tatjana Schneider)

Lightish introduction to a whole issue of field (with articles worth reading); the start of the Spatial Agency Project.

Architecture After Architecture Research Project

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 Happy Age

Rather a miserabilist piece, but gets in that fantastic Seneca quote: ‘Those were happy times before the days of architects.’

Architecture Criticism against the Climate Clock

The keynote article for Architectural Review's 1500 issue. Draws heavily on the joint research with MOULD

Occupational Hazards: Architectural Review

A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.

Modernity and Order, Architecture and the Welfare State

On Park Hill as an example of welfare architecture and its current demise. My first foray into the work of Zygmunt Bauman.

Occupational Hazards: Architectural Review

A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.

Design after Design

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

The Intimate Inner

My contribution to Sarah Wigglesworth’s great book on our house, Stock Orchard Street. Outlines the tensions of being an architect-client.

Glossing over the cracks

My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.

Architecture after Architecture

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.

Flexible Housing

A research project funded AHRC and done with Tatjana Schneider at the University of Sheffield, looking at the history and contemporary possibilities of housing that is designed for future change and adaptation. The project resulted in a book and a number of articles, two of which are apparently among the most cited of ARQ articles. Winner 2007 RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University-based Research. The link is to the almost final version of the book, which was beautifully designed by Ben Weaver.

Three Myths and One Model

Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.

Studio X: Rio de Janeiro

“Beyond the Fountainhead” Lecture at the fantastic Studio X, a venture of Columbia's GSAAD. Video here

Angels with Dirty Faces

The article when I found my voice. Stories, the everyday and a sprinkling of theory.

The Everyday and Architecture: 1997: Academy

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.