Guillermo S. Arsuaga
Supervisor
Abstract
Bio
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 in 2022–23, 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.
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Contact
Prof Dr Ines Weizman
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture
Head of PhD Programme
School of Architecture
Royal College of Art
Kensington Gore, London
SW7 2EU
ines.weizman@rca.ac.uk
School of Architecture, Royal College of Art
Postgraduate Research (PGR) Programme