
Professor Suzanne Ewing
Sabbatical Fellow, May-August 2024
Home Institution: University of Edinburgh
Suzanne Ewing holds a Personal Chair of Architectural Criticism at the University of Edinburgh. Much of her research, project work and public engagement aims to advocate and influence as much as to inform and add insight. She initiated, led and co-curated Architecture and Field/Work (Routledge, 2010), Spaces of Tolerance (Routledge, 2021) and Visual Research Methods in Architecture (Intellect, University of Chicago Press, 2021). From 2012- 2023 she was co-editor of academic journal Architecture and Culture. Since 2015 she has contributed to augmenting knowledge of women’s contribution to architecture and the built environment in Scotland, through the collaborative Voices of Experience project https://voices-architecture.com/ and was awarded RSE funding to establish an interdisciplinary research network based on creative practice: Women Make Cities. A collaborative project, Seeding the Urban, is underway with colleagues from the Universities of Sydney and Cornell University.
Profile title: Studies in Architecture as Moving Project
Architecture as designed background, as completed, timeless artefact, idea or canon are convenient fictions. Convenient for disciplinary and professional formation, reproduction and selective reception. Arguably more of an inconvenience for modes of work in a world that is in flux. We may be moved by architecture. Critical attention may move the project of architecture, its idea(l)s, knowledges, organisational choreographies, manifestations (both built and imagined) and support structures. Architecture may move assumptions, expectations and trajectories of political, social and cultural life.
This research is concerned with movement and temporality in architectural design. Inquiry is anchored in Bruno Latour and Albena Yaneva’s observation that if architecture is a moving project, it demands more appropriately aligned modes of evaluation. Michel Trachtenburg has demonstrated how architecture can be a kind of ‘building-in-time’, yet the modern separation of building and design takes it ‘out of time’. Building on Ewing’s work on disciplinary practices, visual research methods and the critical imagination in Architecture, this research aims to establish a mode of inquiry and lexicon pertaining to architecture as a moving project. What are the slippages and synchronicities between image, techniques, idiolects, experience and criticism that are at play in project formations and responses? What are possible framings, devices and imaginaries (freeze-frames, punctures, junctures…) that re-fictionalise project practices as timely and transformative?