The Long Form brings together Guillermo S. Arsuaga and María Páez González for a discussion on doctoral research as a sustained practice of working with archives, materials, methods and writing. Drawing on their own research, the seminar explores how archival encounters develop into arguments, how methods evolve and change over the course of a PhD, and how writing becomes a research practice through which ideas are tested, structured and given form.

Guillermo S. Arsuaga

Guillermo S. Arsuaga, ARB RIBA, PhD, is an architect, architectural historian, and curator. His current book project, Island Exceptions, developed from his dissertation, examines late Francoist dictatorship in Spain across its mainland and colonial territories, tracing phosphate extraction infrastructure in Western Sahara, settler towns in Equatorial Guinea, nuclear facilities in Castile, tourist development in the Canary Islands, and border works in the Basque Country. Against canonical narratives of power, it argues that repressive spatial and territorial practices were reactive, ripostes to resistance and to forms of everyday life the regime could not absorb. It calls this operation islanding, the production of delimited zones of exception at points of extraction, authoritarian within and wired outward to commodity markets. Crucially, it redefines fascism after 1945 as a material and spatial repertoire rather than an ideology, one that folded readily into neoliberal rhetoric.

He is co-editor of Sick Architecture (MIT Press, 2025), with Beatriz Colomina and Nick Axel, and has published in MoMA post, e-fluxArchitecture, and Future Anterior. Much of his work brings archival material into public circulation. A curatorial Mellon-Marron Fellow at MoMA in2022–23, he contributed to the catalogue of Architects of Liberation: Modernism in Western Africa and to the curatorial team for We the Bacteria at Triennale Milano 2025.

His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Mellon-Marron Research Consortium, the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Princeton Center for Digital Humanities, and the Swedish National Committee for Contemporary Art. His own work was exhibited at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018. He has taught at the AA London,Columbia GSAPP and Princeton University at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.

María Páez González

María Páez González was born in the Venezuelan Andes and currently practices, teaches and studies architecture between London, Vienna and theCanary Islands. She is the Programme Director of Professional Studies in thePractice of Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), where she also leads Postgraduate Unit 16. She teaches at the AA on the History and Theory Studies programme and the PhD programme. Along with Brendon, she co-directs the Canary Islands Visiting School and the Institute forExperimental Critical Infrastructure.

María previously worked in architectural practice for more than adecade, including at Foster + Partners, where she contributed to the design andconstruction of Apple Park in Cupertino. She is also a founding member ofFundación HCGB, dedicated to preserving the architectural heritage of Coro,Venezuela, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

In 2024, María completed her PhD in the Architecture PhD Programme at the Royal College of Art. Her doctoral research, The Architecture of the Central Void and the Endless Interior: Incorporating the Pioneer in Silicon Valley’s ‘Big Tech’ Headquarters, examined the relationship between architecture, subjectivity, work, and the spatial cultures of Silicon Valley.