Speakers Biographies

Camillo Boano

Camillo Boano is Full Professor of Urban Design and Critical Theory at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) and Full Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Dipartimento Interateneo di Scienze, Progetto e Politiche, Terri­torio del Politecnico di Torino, Italy. He is Co-Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory. Camillo’s research has centred on the encounters between critical theory, radical philosophy, and urban design processes, specifically engaging with informal urbanisations, urban collective actions, as well as crisis-generated urbanisms. He is working on a series of interconnected research projects in Latin America, South East Asia and the Middle East on urban infrastructures, habitability and the urban project. He is the author of The Ethics of Potential Urbanism. Critical Encounters between Giorgio Agamben and Architecture (Routlege, 2017) and Progetto Minore. Alla ricerca della Minorità nel Progetto Archiettonico ed Urbanistico (LetteraVentidue, 2020).

David Cunningham

David Cunningham is Deputy Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at the University of Westminster in London and an editor of the journal Radical Philosophy. He has published widely on modern architecture, urban theory and capitalism, including in the journals Architectural Design, City, Journal of Architecture and Journal of Visual Culture.

Peggy Deamer

Peggy Deamer is Professor Emerita of Yale University’s School of Architecture and principal in the firm of Deamer, Studio.  She is the founding member of the Architecture Lobby, a group advocating for the value of architectural design and labor. She is the editor of Architecture and Capitalism: 1845 to the Present and The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design and the author of Architecture and Labor. Articles by her have appeared in Log, Avery Review, e-Flux, and Harvard Design Magazine amongst other journals. Her theory work explores the relationship between subjectivity, design, and labor in the current economy. Her design work has appeared in HOME, Home and Garden, Progressive Architecture, and the New York Times amongst other journals. She received the Architectural Record 2018 Women in Architecture Activist Award and the 2021 John Q. Hejduk Award.

Nadir Lahiji

Nadir Lahiji is an architect, educator, and critic. He holds a Ph.D. in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He is most recently the author of Architecture in the Age of Pornography: Reading Alain Badiou (Routledge, 2021). His previous publications include, Architecture, Philosophy and the Pedagogy of Cinema: From Benjamin to Badiou (Routledge, 2021), Architecture or Revolution: Emancipatory Critique after Marx (Routledge, 2020), An Architecture Manifesto: Critical Reason and Theories of a Failed Practice (Routledge, 2019), Adventures with the Theory of the Baroque and French Philosophy. He is the co-author of The Architecture of Phantasmagoria: Specters of the City (Routledge, 2017).

Leandro Medrano

Leandro Medrano is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of São Paulo (FAUUSP). His main work addresses the relationship between social housing and urban development. Theory of urbanism, urban sociology, urban design and economic development are some of the research fields involved in his research. Medrano has also been involved in partnerships with research groups from other universities, such as GSD Harvard, KTH, UPM and TUDelft. In addition to teaching and research activities, he has served in many positions at the University, as: Coordinator of the Architecture and Urbanism Course, Board of Directors of the Science Museum of Unicamp, Executive Committee of the Museum of Visual Arts at Unicamp. Is Editor-in-chief of de journal Pós.Revista FAUUSP and Coordinator of the research group Critical Thinking and Contemporary City (PC3). His work has been published in books and academic journals.

Jane Rendell

Jane Rendell is Professor of Critical Spatial Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research, writing and pedagogic practice engage architecture, art, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. Through authored books, such as The Architecture of Psychoanalysis (2017), Silver (2016), Site-Writing (2010), Art and Architecture (2006), and The Pursuit of Pleasure (2001), she has introduced concepts of ‘critical spatial practice’ and ‘site-writing’. She has co-edited nine collections, including Critical Architecture (2007) and Gender, Space, Architecture (1999). She currently curates https://site-readingwritingquarterly.co.uk/ and https://www.practisingethics.org/; leads The Bartlett’s Ethics Commission, and is Co-I of ‘The Ethics of Urban Research Practice’ for the ESCR-funded project KNOW.

Douglas Spencer

Douglas Spencer is Pickard Chilton Professor of Architecture and Director of Graduate Education at Iowa State University’s Department of Architecture. The author of The Architecture of Neoliberalism: How Architecture Became an Instrument of Control and Compliance (2016), and Critique of Architecture: Essays on Theory, Autonomy and Political Economy (2021), his work critically theorizes the relationship between architecture, landscape, and the production of subjectivity. His writing has been published in Radical Philosophy, e-flux, Harvard Design Magazine, Avery Review, New Geographies, Volume, Log, Journal of Architecture, and in many edited collections on the politics of architecture and landscape.