Dr Jacob Paskins

Jacob Paskins is an architectural and urban historian whose research interests include modern architecture and urban design, building sites and construction labour, the historical development of sensory perception, and the obsolescence of media and technology. He teaches on architecture in global contexts and on the intersections between architecture, film and mass media.

Jacob graduated from UCL with a BA in French and History of Art. He completed an MSc in Architectural History and a PhD in Architectural History and Theory at the UCL Bartlett School of Architecture. His master’s and doctoral studies were funded by studentships from the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He was the Eugenie Strong Research Fellow in Architectural History at Girton College, University of Cambridge from 2012 to 2015. At UCL Jacob has held teaching fellowships in Urban Studies (Department of Geography), and Architectural History and Theory (Bartlett School of Architecture). Jacob joined the History of Art Department in 2017; was appointed Lecturer (Teaching) and Head of Education in 2021, and Associate Professor (Teaching) in 2023.

Research

My research in architectural and urban history is strongly informed by studies in visual culture, mass media and moving-image research. My research has focused on the role of labour in architectural and urban design; social, cultural and political processes of urban development in France and Britain; media representations of architecture; and multi-sensory experience of architecture and cities. I have also instigated research on a cultural history of the hovercraft, and on the contested spaces around transport hubs.

I have published articles and chapters on post-war architecture and urbanism in the Paris region, and a book entitled Paris Under Construction: Building Sites and Urban Transformation in the 1960s (Routledge, 2016). Piecing together the social, political and cultural responses to construction, through a close analysis of written, oral, filmed and visual accounts of building sites, this body of research drew on an unconventional range of sources and archives, including trade union material.

My interests in urban infrastructure and the struggles of migrant construction workers informs my ongoing research on the development, operation and eventual decline of hoverports in Britain and France, from 1960 to the present. The research proposes a comparative assessment of the social consequences of hoverports and the ensuing urban expansion in the coastal regions they served. I have also undertaken research on the multi-sensory experience of space, including the sound cultures of the London Underground. Questions of the obsolescence of everyday objects, media and technology have been central to my research during the past decade, and I recently published an essay on the now defunct Paris pneumatic postal system.

Specialisms

• Modern architecture and urban design
• Building sites and construction labour
• Obsolescence of media and technology

Selected Publications

• Paris Under Construction: Building Sites and Urban Transformation in the 1960s. New York: Routledge, 2016.
• “Pneumatic Postal System.” In Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects, edited by Barbara Penner, Adrian Forty, Miranda Critchley, and Olivia Horsfall Turner. London: Reaktion, 2021.
• “Constructing Work: Politics, Society and Architectural History on the Paris Building Site.” In Societies Under Construction: Geographies, Sociologies and Histories of Building, edited by Daniel J. Sage and Chloé Vitry, 87–114. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
• “Constructing the Hoverport.” In Proceedings of the Fifth International Congress on Construction History, edited by Brian Bowen, Donald Friedman, Thomas Leslie, and John Ochsendorf, vol. 3, 99–106. Chicago: Construction History Society of America, 2015.
• “The Boulevard Lefebvre Disaster: A Crisis in Construction.” Architectural Histories 1, no. 1 (2013): 1–15.

For a full list of publications, see Jacob’s RPS profile.

Teaching and Supervision

Jacob’s teaching specialisms include modern and contemporary architecture, urban design and film. He has taught architectural history survey courses, from premodernity to the contemporary; undergraduate modules on housing and urban design from the eighteenth century to the present day; and postgraduate modules on film representations of cities, and multi-sensory architecture. At UCL History of Art he has taught a first-year thematic seminar on the styles, forms and materials of architecture in London; a second-year period module on architecture, colonialism and globalisation; and a final-year special subject on the historiography and representation of architecture and cities from 1900 to the present. Jacob particularly values field-based teaching and regularly leads seminars in galleries and museums, and on the streets of London.

Jacob supervises undergraduate and master’s dissertations on a broad range of architectural and urban topics. Recent student projects include: social interactions in the communal spaces of Singaporean housing estates; Space, Craft and Culture of a Disappearing Polish Nation; representations of domestic space in Nordic TV dramas; inhabiting ‘found space’ through sound in London; defining queer-space in post-war London; Fragments of Time, Memory and Space in the reconstruction of Warsaw; theorising space in the films of Agnès Varda; the architecture of cancer care.

Modules taught:

• HART0144 Thematic Seminar (London Architecture: Materials and Forms)
• HART0051 Architecture and Modernity
• HART0106 Architecture and the Modern City

Contact

Email: jacob.paskins@ucl.ac.uk

Office: Room 204, 21 Gordon Square

Office hours: Term 1: Tuesdays, 1:00-2:00 pm; Thursdays, 11:00 am-12:00 pm (held in person; no appointment required).