Francesca Hughes
PhD University of Edinburgh
MArch University of East London
BSc University of Edinburgh
An architect by training, Francesca Hughes is an architectural theorist and educator. Having taught both studio and history & theory in London, at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and then at the Architectural Association, for more than 25 years, she was Professor of Architecture and Head of School at UTS, Sydney, from 2018 to 2020. She commences her new role as Scully Visiting Professor at Yale this Fall.
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 work which is sited at the feminist intersection of architecture and history of technology. To this end, her research spans a critique of reductive superficiality in architecture’s use of computation in Drawings that Count (AA Publications, 2013); an examination 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 of architecture’s relations to systems of measure and prediction in Architectures of Prediction (ARQ docs, 2019). Her current research, Indiscreet Histories of Architecture’s Universal Discrete Machine, examines the histoires longue durées of architecture’s entanglement with the various duties, devices and desires that make up the project of computation. More generally, Francesca’s writings and design 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, e-flux, Merrell, MIT Press, Park Books, Random House, Monacelli Press, Routledge, University of Minnesota Press and Wiley. Having collaborated with historians of science, archaeologists, filmmakers, robotic landscapers and performance artists, Francesca remains intent on interrogating architecture’s perimeter
