My response as to why giving the official government website 2013 Design of the Year was not so cool.
This is a rare one where I write specifically about buildings, or in this case the subtlety of the plans of Proctor Matthews Architects. Online here, pdf here.
My contribution to Sarah Wigglesworth’s great book on our house, Stock Orchard Street. Outlines the tensions of being an architect-client.
A short think piece on the 2011 Occupation movement and its relevance to architecture.
The keynote article for Architectural Review's 1500 issue. Draws heavily on the joint research with MOULD
A bit of a cheat, because it is really the second chapter of Architecture Depends
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
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
My essay on architectural research, Three Myths and One Model, is being translated into French, so I thought it was time to write a new introduction to it, because the argument felt a bit tired, presented as it was ten years ago.
Second of two, with some hints as to how to achieve flexible housing, much more developed in the book.
My main statement of intent, which has been extensively reviewed (collected here) and featured on BBC Radio 3 and 4. The contents are available on the MIT Press website, as are pdfs of the preface and introduction. A version of Chapter 2 was published in field: and is available as a pdf. Winner 2009 RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding University based research. In 2025 I wrote an epilogue for the French translation.
A short introduction to the book Architecture, Participation and Society, edited by Leslie Forsyth and Paul Jenkins in 2009
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.
Originally commissioned by the RIBA, a piece on what might or might not constitute architectural research. Big in Spain.
On the day that the Brexit referendum was announced, I impulsively wrote to all my CSM colleagues. The email was then leaked and waves were created, not least in the Daily Mail who later included this as evidence that I was one of many traitors to the so-called 'will of the people.'
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.
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.