Ultimo
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Sydney NSW 2007
Australia
An architectural theorist, educator, and specialist in architecture’s transforming relationship to technology has been appointed as the new Head of the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Architecture.
Professor Francesca Hughes has more than 25 years experience in the field of architectural education, theory and practice and will join UTS’s School of Architecture in October 2018. For the last two decades she has taught both design studios and history and theory at the Architectural Association and the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, in London where she is from. This year she has also taught at The Berlage, TU Delft, and as a visiting professor at KU Leuven in Brussels.
Professor Hughes has lectured widely in the US, Australia and Europe, including at e-flux, The Berlage, Princeton, Yale, MIT, Harvard and the London Science Museum. She is co-founder of the multidisciplinary practice, Hughes Meyer Studio with American artist Jonathan Meyer, and their work has received RIBA awards and been widely published and exhibited.
Dean of the UTS Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, Professor Elizabeth Mossop welcomes Professor Hughes to the University and the Faculty.
“It is an exciting time for the School of Architecture. Professor Hughes brings a new perspective with scholarly rigour and thoughtful insight into architectural education and practice,” Professor Mossop said.
“Staff and students will be engaged in a reinvigorated discourse within the school and the architectural community in Sydney.”
Professor Hughes has published several books; she is author of The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision (MIT Press, 2014) and prior to this edited Drawings that Count (AA Publications, 2012) and The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press, 1996). She is currently working on a new book examining the prehistory of architecture’s role in and relations to computation.
“I am most excited and honoured to be joining the architecture school at UTS,” Professor Hughes said.
“UTS has a very strong reputation in both research and teaching in architecture and landscape architecture.
“Recent appointments have added international experience to deep local knowledge, making it a very vibrant, diverse intellectual community ready to innovate and develop architecture’s agency in addressing the rapidly evolving global socio-political, technological and environmental questions we face.
“Despite the marginalisation of the architect as an instrument of social and technological change in the last decade or so, I believe it is now precisely the architect’s multidisciplinary skill set, humanist education and cross-digital fluency that will imagine, design and materialise answers to some of today’s most complex and seemingly irreversible problems.
“My focus will be to refine and strengthen the school’s pedagogical project—by extending what, when and how our students learn—and the school’s research, by nurturing its intellectual capital, imagination and knowledge transfer in order to build a bank of ideas for architecture’s future, both locally and globally.”
Professor Hughes will succeed Professor Martin Bryant, who is stepping down from his role as Head of School and will continue as a Professor of Landscape Architecture.
