History and Theory of Architecture

We have a dynamic history and theory research community made up of designers, historians, theoreticians, technologists, critics, filmmakers, activists and artists. They conduct a wide range of work, from scholarly papers, to authored and edited books, creative writing, collective practice, installations and exhibitions. Our staff have developed innovative approaches to history and theory teaching and pedagogy, strongly informed by their own research.
 

Activities

• A termly forum for all staff, promoting discussion on matters of history and theory within the context of the school, and the arts, sciences and humanities more broadly
• Public conferences, focusing on contemporary issues of relevance for architectural history and theory and provoking debates about the relation of historical, theoretical and critical issues in architecture and their relation to design, technology and professional practice.

History and Theory Throughout the School's Programmes

History and theory is taught through core and optional modules, depending on whether a programme has a predominant history and theory emphasis, or actively combines history and theory with, for example, urban, architectural and conservation design, technology, artistic research, or computational practice. 

The school also has a PhD pathway devoted to the development of original knowledge in the field of architectural and urban history, theory and criticism specifically – Architectural & Urban History & Theory MPhil/PhD, as well as our three further PhD programmes in which historical and theoretical research plays a role.  

Research Projects 

• Architecture and Globalisation in the Persian Gulf Region
• Architectures of Chance
• Bathroom
• Claude Parent: l'oeuvre construite, l'oeuvre graphique
• Concrete and Culture: A Material History
• Design Research in Architecture: An Overview
• Digital Poetics: An Open Theory of Design-Research in Architecture
• Drive: Journeys through Film, Cities and Landscapes
• Gender, Infrastructure and the Production of Domesticity in the (Post)Communist City
• La Tendenza: architectures italiennes 1965-1985
• Living in the Periphery: Provinciality and Domestic Space in Colonial Bengal
• Marcel Duchamp and the Architecture of Desire
• McMorran & Whitby
• Modernism in China: Architectural Visions and Revolutions
• Newlyweds on Tour: Honeymooning in Nineteenth-Century America
• Pol Abraham: architecte
• Relational Architectural Ecologies: Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity
• Remaking London: Decline and Regeneration in Urban Culture
• Sexuate Subjects: Politics, Poetics and Ethics
• Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism
• Skateboarding, Space and the City: Architecture and the Body
• Space, Geometry and Aesthetics: Through Kant and Towards Deleuze
• The Alphabet and the Algorithm
• The Inhabitable Flesh of Architecture
• Weather Architecture