Lectures
George Morris Woodruff, Class of 1857, Memorial Lecture
Francesca Hughes
Circling the Digital: a Troubled History
Francesca Hughes is the Vincent Scully Visiting Professor in Architectural History. An architect by training, she started teaching in the mid-nineties at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, London, moving to the Architectural Association in 2002, where she taught across both studio and history and theory until 2017. She was Professor of Architecture and Head of School at UTS, Sydney, from 2018 until 2021. More recently she has held teaching positions at The Berlage Institute, Delft, and Princeton University. Over the last three decades she has served as external examiner to numerous schools internationally.
An early focus on feminist critical theory and architecture, The Architect: Reconstructing her Practice (MIT Press, 1996), sits at the foundation of her larger body of research which is sited at the feminist intersection of architecture and the history of science and technology. To this end, her publications include a critique of reductive superficiality in architecture’s use of computation in Drawings that Count (AA Publications, 2013); an interrogation of architecture’s relations to precision and material error in The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure and the Misadventures of Precision (MIT Press, 2014); and an exploration into architecture’s relations to predictive systems and their eclipse of the present in Architectures of Prediction (ARQ docs, 2019).
During the last decade her writings have turned from questions of error and failure to systems of correction, focusing on the histoires longues durées of co-constitutive relations between the ancient project of computation and architectural imagination, if not architecture itself. Her current research project, Indiscreet Histories of Architecture’s Universal Discrete Machine, constructs a historiography of architecture’s epistemological entanglement with the various duties, devices and desires that have long made up the project of computation.
These and other writings have been published by AA Files, AD, ANY, AR, A/R/P/A (Columbia GSAP), Art Forum, Columbia University Books on Architecture, e-flux Architecture, Harvard Design Magazine, Merrell, MIT Press, Park Books, Random House, Monacelli Press, Routledge, University of Minnesota Press and Wiley. Francesca’s collaborative projects with, variously, historians of science, archaeologists, visual artists, filmmakers, robotic landscapers and performance artists, include an art archive in London (recipient of an RIBA award) and the film Aeolian Piano (recipient of an Arts Council of Great Britain grant).
collage: Jonathan Meyer
