An architect by training, Francesca Hughes is an internationally renowned architectural theorist and educator. Having taught across both studio and history & theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and then the Architectural Association in London for more than 25 years, she was Professor of Architecture and Head of School at UTS, Sydney, from 2018 to 2020. Given her extensive knowledge of different architectural education cultures and models, Francesca has served as visiting professor and external examiner at numerous schools in the UK, US, Asia and Europe.
The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press 1996), an early focus on feminist criticism and architecture, sits at the foundation of her larger body of published work which examines architecture’s thorny relations to technology. To this end, her written and design research spans a critique of reductive superficiality in architecture’s use of computation inDrawings that Count (AA Publications, 2013), an examination of architecture’s relations to precision and material error inThe Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision (MIT Press, 2014), and an exploration of architecture’s relations to systems of measure and prediction inArchitectures of Prediction (ARQ docs, 2019). Her current project,The Architect’s Computer: An Indiscrete History of the Universal Discrete Machine, is an histoire longue durée of the discipline’s relations to the constituents of modern and ancient computation: the algorithm as calculator of new ‘truths’; the cognitive interface and its universal languages; memory storage and retrieval; deletion and forgetting; and the window. Having collaborated with historians of science, archaeologists, filmmakers, robotic landscapers and performance artists, Francesca remains intent on expanding architecture’s perimeter and an ardent advocate of all things rigorously multi-disciplinary.
Francesca has lectured internationally and acted as keynote to numerous conferences. Her written and built work have been published byAA Files, AD, ANY, AR, A/R/P/A (Columbia GSAP), Art Forum, Columbia University Books on Architecture, e-flux Architecture,Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux, Merrell, Park Books, Random House (Monacelli), Routledge, University of Minnesota Press and Wiley and exhibited in the UK and abroad.
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