Staff Profile
Professor Katie Lloyd Thomas
Professor of Architectural Theory and History and Co-Director of Architecture Research Collaborative (ARC)
- Email: katie.lloyd-thomas@ncl.ac.uk
- Telephone: +44 (0) 191 208 5014
- Address: School of Architecture Planning and Landscape
The Quadrangle
University of Newcastle
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
I trained as an architect at Cambridge University and at the University of East London, and spent some years in architectural practice. I have been involved, first on a part-time basis, in architectural education in the UK for more than 20 years, during which time I completed an MA in Architecture and Critical Theory at Nottingham University (2000) and a PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Middlesex University (2010) entitled ‘Building Materials’ Conceptualising materials via the architectural specification’ . I joined SAPL in 2011 and with Dr Martyn Dade-Robertson, I now co-direct the Architectural Research Collaborative (ARC).
I’m an editor at the international journal arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, a founding member of the feminist art architecture collective taking place, and as steering group member of AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) and NUHRI (Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute) I promote architectural humanities research and education. My research is concerned with materiality and technology, and their intersections with architectural concepts, practice and design, and with feminist practice and theory. Notable edited collections include Material Matters (Routledge, 2007) and with Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech Industries of Architecture (Routledge Critiques, 2015).
My research is concerned with materiality and technology, and their intersections with architectural concepts, practice and design. Notable edited collections include Material Matters (Routledge, 2007) and as part of a 6 year collaboration with Tilo Amhoff and Nick Beech, Industries of Architecture (Routledge Critiques, 2015), and a monograph Preliminary Operations: Material theory and the architectural specification is in preparation. I have also long been active in feminist practice and theory and in 2001 co-founded the feminist art architecture collective taking place, and led project development and co-ordination for The Other Side of Waiting, a series of five interconnected art installations in the mother and baby unit of Homerton Hospital, East London, raising almost £70,000, and winning two highly competitive grants totalling £24,668 from the Arts Council England.
My current project, ‘The Architect as Shopper: Building products and the ‘proprietary turn’ in architecture in the interwar period’ brings together these two areas of my research, and has been awarded a research fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (summer 2017). Together with Professor João Marcos Almeida de Lopes (University of São Paulo) and Dr Silke Kapp (Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais), I am also developing Translating Ferro/Translating Production, to translate, disseminate, debate and explore the cross-cultural potential of the unique and significant body of the work of the Brazilian architect, artist and theorist Sérgio Ferro which raises questions of global reach about art and architectural production under capitalism. Ferro’s work has been both controversial and acclaimed, and is central to the work of several architects in Brazil working with communities towards self-managed building construction, but it is little-known outside the country. Another nascent project explores the spatially paradoxical and contested phenomenon of the prison swimming pool, as part of a new linked research project The Empty Pool with MArch students and Rona Lee, Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University.
With extensive prior experience in BA studio teaching, I currently teach history and theory at all levels in the architecture programme from Stage 1 to PhD. As director of history and theory I’ve overseen the restructuring of provision in the BA 2016/17, including the introduction of research-led teaching in new BA dissertation electives encompassing creative practice submissions through to technical investigations. I am committed to establishing seminar teaching at all levels, and to developing relationships between history and theory, and design, practice and technology. At MArch level I run a linked research project ‘The Empty Pool’ with Rona Lee, Professor of Fine Art at Northumbria University.
PhD Supervision
I’ve examined PhDs at the Bartlett UCL and here at Newcastle, and welcome enquiries from prospective candidates in the areas of material theory and philosophy, technologies and techniques, feminist theory and practice. I currently lead and co-supervise the following doctoral students:
With Professor Mark Dorrian (Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture):
- Catalina Mejia Moreno On Photography, repetition and architectural criticism. ‘Working-through’ the archives of Mies van der Rohe and Lilly Reich’s German Pavilion and the Buffalo Grain Elevators.
- Tijana Stevanovi? Unfinished Blueprint: Institutionalisation and Appropriation in New Belgrade
With Professor Adam Sharr:
- James Longfield Making Byker: The Situated, Amateur Practices of A Citizen Architect
- Ashley Mason A Coincidental Plot: The Potential of Paracontextuality in Spatial Practice
With Professor Prue Chiles:
- Matt Ozga-Lawn: The Duke in his Domain: Revealing the Studio Space
With Dr Stephen Parnell:
- Ruth Lang: Frameworks for Ingenuity: Processes of Practice in the London County Council Architects Department (1943-65)
- Lloyd Thomas K, Amhoff T, Beech N, ed. Industries of Architecture. London and New York: Routledge, 2016.
- Lloyd Thomas K, Amhoff T, Beech N. Industries of Architecture. In: Lloyd-Thomas, K; Amhoff, A; Beech, N, ed. Industries of Architecture. London and New York: Routledge, 2016, pp.10.
- Lloyd Thomas K, Beech N. Into the Hidden Abode: Architecture, Production, Process. Architecture and Culture 2015, 3(3), 271-279.
- Lloyd Thomas K, Amhoff A. Writing work: Changing practices of architectural specification. In: Peggy Deamer, ed. The Architect as Worker: Immaterial Labor, the Creative Class, and the Politics of Design. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2015, pp.121-143.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Casting Operations and the Description of Process. Journal of Architecture 2015, 20(3), 430-444.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Rendered Plastic by Preparation: Concrete as constant material. Parallax 2015, 21(3), 271-287.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Between the Womb and the World: Building Matrixial Relations in the NICU. In: Rawes, P, ed. Architectural Relational Ecologies : Architecture, Nature and Subjectivity. London: Routledge, 2013, pp.192-208.
- Lloyd Thomas K. ‘Of their several kinds’: forms of clause in the architectural specification. arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 2012, 16(3), 229-237.
- Lloyd Thomas K, Amhoff T, Beech N. Further Reading Required. Architectural Research Quarterly 2012, 16(3), 197-199.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Incubators, Pumps and Other Hard-Breasted Bodies. In: Gunkel, H., Nigianni, C., Söderbäck, F, ed. Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp.113-125.
- Lloyd Thomas K. The Excessive Materiality of Stock Orchard Street: Towards a Feminist Material Practice. In: Wigglesworth, S, ed. Around and About Stock Orchard Street. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011, pp.118-131.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Specifying transparency: from 'best seconds' to 'new glass performances'. In: Sharr, A, ed. Reading Architecture and Culture: Researching Buildings, Spaces and Documents. Abingdon: Routledge, 2012, pp.179-196.
- Lloyd Thomas K. The Other Side of Waiting. Feminist Review 2009, 93(1), 122-127.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Building While Being In It: notes on drawing “otherhow”. In: Petrescu, D, ed. Altering Practices: Feminist Politics and Poetics of Space. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007, pp.89-112.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Going Into the Mould: Process and materials in the architectural specification. Radical Philosophy 2007, 144.
- Lloyd Thomas K, ed. Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice. Abingdon: Routledge, 2007.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Specifying Materials: language, matter and the conspiracy of muteness. In: Frascari, M., Hale, J., Starkey, B, ed. From Models to Drawings. London, UK: Routledge, 2007, pp.142-152.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Specifications: Writing materials in architecture and philosophy. arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 2004, 8(3/4), 277-283.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Conceiving Architecture Through Colour. Visual Culture in Britain 2001, 1(2).
- Lloyd Thomas K. Jigging with Concrete: matter and form in the making of Wall One. In: Chandler, A., Pedreschi, R, ed. Fabric Formwork. London, UK: RIBA Publications, 2007, pp.96.
- Lloyd Thomas K. Lines in Practice. Geography Research Forum 2001, 21.
- Lloyd Thomas K, Stratford H, Hoskyns T. Taking place. Scroope 2001, 14.
- Chandler A, Lloyd Thomas K. Introduction to two essays exploring techniques and meanings of fabric formworking as it moves into large-scale production. Journal of Architecture 2015, 20(3), 419.