Research Themes

The Architecture & Social Movements research line interrogates the role of architectural practice and thinking within social movements and grassroots organisations. This research recognises social and grassroots movements, popular and community organisations and similar non-governmental groups as important agents of spatial and territorial transformation.

Climate Justice brings together researchers from across the programmes of the School of Architecture on the foundational premise that environments are entangled hybrids of social, material-energetic and ecological relations, and that there are no social questions that do not enfold ecological relations, and no ecological relations that do not enfold social and political forces. We ask how do we even approach thinking about our condition of ecological and climate emergency when many of our very categories and concepts for thinking environmentally emerged through practices of colonial geopolitical violence and exploitation?

Following the premise of the “documentary method”, this research theme reads the building as a prism through which different histories are diffracted. It considers film, video, social media and a range of state-of-the-art digital documentation techniques not merely as representational technologies but as constitutive elements in the making of architecture and of architectural history. In this thematic cluster, researchers explore architectural history beyond the biographies of architects, inhabitants, and users.

Feelings rule the world. The emotional geographies and affective economies of elections, protests, of pandemic grief and loss, of spaces of migration and flight, and of the immediacy and monotony of the domestic, are forming new times of relationality and exposing new and persistent inequities. As Ahmed suggests, we must pay attention not just to affects and emotions, but to the work emotions do, to the way they not only move us but move the world.

Beyond the meta-institutions such as government, the economy, healthcare or education, are nested sub-institutions, such as religion or sexual identity that, when considered in the abstract, reveal the mechanisms through which institutional resistance is most likely to be realised. Institutions are not static symbols of power but are awarded power through routine interactions and collective complicity.

This research group examines concepts of the architectural interior, such as home, domesticity and furniture objects as a cultural and social history, but also spatially, in how it conditions behaviours and intimacies. It describes a place, often a collection of rooms, which encapsulate all forms of human relations and behaviours. It also is the space that personifies experimentation in how we live, speculations on finance, ownership and the asset: the commodifying of privacy. The home is the site for improvement, maintenance, regulatory governance and standards.

The Laboratory for Design and Machine Learning is formed of a multi-disciplinary team working on experimental and fundamental research into new methodologies and knowledge needed for emerging design processes at the intersection of machine learning, data processing and visualisation, and legal and developmental frameworks. Its research is dedicated to testing new interdisciplinary forms of designing and evaluation, hereby studying the impact of machine learning and governmental policies on spatial design.