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

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.

Echo City: British Pavilion at 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale

Chosen in open competition to curate the British Pavilion, I put together the best creative minds in Sheffield to present an echo of this wonderful city (the link takes you to my initial application, and I have to say the room data sheets are not bad). The team included: Ian Anderson, Tim Etchells, Hugo Glendinning, Encounters, Martyn Ware, and Jim Prevett. The show attempted to explain how a city is great beyond its buildings: it did not have much architecture in, which did not go down well with architects, especially those in London, who were doubly annoyed that a provincial academic was doing the show. But beyond the Clerkenwell goldfish bowl (with Ellis Woodman in particularly splenetic form, fortunately now behind a paywall), the exhibition was better received (i.e in Die Presse, Der Standard, Financial Times, The Architects Newspaper, The Times, The Yorkshire Post, and of course the Sheffield Telegraph)

Architecture Criticism against the Climate Clock

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

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

Lost Judgment

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.

Three Myths and One Model

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

Against Resilience

Another version of Architecture after Architecture. This time in a conference about resilience held in Miami, and I went in hard. I think one of the better lectures on the subject that I have given. Starts at 23.30.

ChatGTP does Jeremy

In an idle moment I asked ChatGTP to "write a short statement in the style of the architecture critic Jeremy Till on the state of the architectural profession" The result is scarily good.

Bread and Circuses

A short piece that I wrote in 2010 for the Architects Journal about end-of-year architecture shows. Some rather paranoid architectural tutors at Westminster (where I was then Dean) saw this as an attack on them personally, and so excommunicated me forthwith. In fact it was nothing to do with them but rather a concern about the general direction of architectural education as manifested through the exhibition.

Three Myths and One Model

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

Stock Orchard Street

My last (ever?) building as an architect, designed with Sarah Wigglesworth. Made of straw and stuff. Best known for being on Grand Designs, the video of which is online. Sarah’s wonderful book on the project views it from all sides. Winner of the RIBA Sustainability Award, a Civic Trust Award and some others. Lots and lots of reviews of the project, including the Observer, and, and, ... A 2021 film of it by Jim Stephenson is here, with a discussion afterwards. We live in it and are happy.

Occupational Hazards: Architectural Review

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

Angels with Dirty Faces

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

Alternate Currents

Another introduction, this time for ARQ, to projects arising out of the Spatial Agency project.

Designs of the Year 2014

Article for The Conversation critiquing the reductive way that things are chosen for the Designs of the Year exhibition.

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.