More or less what it says on the tin — facts that were correct in early 2012.
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.
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...
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.
Architecture Depends
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.
A bit of a cheat, because it is really the second chapter of Architecture Depends
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.
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.
My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
Rather a miserabilist piece, but gets in that fantastic Seneca quote: ‘Those were happy times before the days of architects.’
Not my musing, but that of my brother Nick Till. Nails the issues around Margaret Thatcher's funeral rather beautifully in two paragraphs
A critique of masterplanning. On to something here, but yet to be developed.
Lightish introduction to a whole issue of field (with articles worth reading); the start of the Spatial Agency Project.
My closing speech at the main conference for What's the Point of Art School, a series of events organised by Central Saint Martins. The video of the speech, which was well-recieved, is here. Other talks, including brilliance from Johnny Vegas, are here. There was a good write up of the day in the Guardian.
With Nishat Awan and Tatjana Schneider. Out of the Spatial Agency project, the book provides supporting texts to the website. A summary of the issues is in our Architecture Today article, and an early review by Luke Butcher is here, plus nice ones in archidose and arquilecturas. A short excerpt (on ecological examples of spatial agency) was published in field. Winner 2011 RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University based research.