It’s great to see the recent publication of Susannah Dickinson, Aletheia Ida and Jonathan Bean’s edited collection of essays The Unexamined, Critical Practices in Architecture and Place-Making (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2020), to which I have contributed a ‘Foreword: Critical Spatial Practice: Introductions and Adjustments’, and, ‘Postscript: From Critical to Ethical Spatial Practice’.

I had been invited to give a keynote for the related conference in spring 2018, but had had to shift to an online delivery because I needed to participate in the UCL UCU strike. I had got used to giving online talks over the past decade as I tried to reduce my carbon footprint. It has now become the way of doing conferences due to COVID19; but flying is not something I will return to, as I decided to stop flying entirely in Sept 2019 due to the climate emergency.

I am looking forward to contributing to two on-line conferences coming up in the first week of October.

Remote Practices: Architecture in Proximity organised by Lilian Chee (NUS) and Matthew Mindrup (University of Sydney) where I will discuss my new work around Selvedges.

and

Approaching Research Practices convened by Meike Schalk (KTH), Torsten Lange (TUM), Andreas Putz (TUM) and Frank van der Hoeven (TUD), where I will talk about ‘practising ethics’.

During the COVID19 lockdown in the UK Jonathan Green from Blueprint on Australian ABC Radio interviewed me about my book The Architecture of Psychoanalysis and we discussed how spaces of analysis have changed in response to the pandemic crisis. 

I was really happy when in spring colleagues Michal Murawski and David Roberts asked me to contribute to their fantastic online portal piramMMMida, a project which engages power, planet, and plague, and curated by Denis Maksimov, Masha Mileeva, Michal Murawski, and David Roberts. It gave me the chance to share a new visual work, Seven Studies for ‘A Holding’, (23 March–31 May 2020).

In early summer Lili Zarzycki invited me to write a new essay for the Architectural Review’s special issue on criticism. I contributed ‘Marginal modes: Positions-of-architecture-writing’, a piece which explores my current interest in auto-theoretical writing, and criticism that blends fact and fiction.

The first part of 2020 saw the publication of several works which had been in the pipeline for a while:

‘Activating Home and Work’ in Sandra Loschke’s edited volume Non-Standard  Architectural Production: Between Experience, Action and Critique, (London: Routledge, 2019).

‘Silver: A Courtroom Drama’, for Gabu Heindl, Michael Klein, and Christina Linortner’s edited collection Building Critique, (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2020). This is the transcript of a site-specific work I contributed to Justy Phillip’s and Margaret Woodward’s wonderful project Lost Rocks, alongside the fictionella Silver that they commissioned for A Published Event.

‘Sites, Situations, and other kinds of Situatedness’, Bryony Roberts (ed), Expanded Modes of Practice, Special Issue of Log. 48, (2020).