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Staff Profile

Dr Stephen Parnell

Senior Lecturer

  • Email: stephen.parnell@ncl.ac.uk
  • Telephone: +44 (0) 191 20 86802
  • Address: School of Architecture Planning and Landscape
    2nd Floor, Building Science, The Quadrangle
    Newcastle University
    Newcastle upon Tyne
    NE1 7RU
Background

I'm a qualified architect and PassivHaus designer, an architecture critic, accidental historian of post-war architecture.


I am interested in the sociology of the architectural profession and particularly the role that the media play in it. My research is on, teaching is through, and practice is in the architectural media: I have written over 130 articles for the professional architectural press over the past 17 years and was shortlisted for the IBP's Architecture Writer of the Year in 2011 and 2012.

My PhD, 'Architectural Design 1954-1972: the contribution of the architectural magazine to the writing of architectural history', completed under Peter Blundell-Jones (Architecture) and Martin Conboy (Journalism) at Sheffield University, won the 2012 RIBA President's Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis. That year I also exhibited 'Architecture Magazines: Playgrounds and Battlegrounds' in the Padiglione Centrale of the Venice Biennale. This featured AD, AR, Casabella, and Domus magazines from the 1940s to the 1970s and an 11 x 3m wallchart showing the network of relationships of key individuals and institutions related to these London and Milanese magazines.

Thanks to a RIBA Research Trust Award, I extended this PhD research to the Post-Modern years of Andreas Papadakis's Academy, and I have since also stretched it back to AD's origin in 1930. The Paul Mellon Centre has supported me with a Research Grant and Mid-Career Fellowship, enabling me to prepare a full critical history of AD magazine from 1930 to 1992 and its relationship to architectural culture, history, and practice which will be published by Harvard Design Press in 2026.

I am also currently preparing a book on Theo Crosby with Juliana Kei and Alan Powers for Lund Humphries and writing a book on Concrete for Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series (both due 2026).

I am a former Editor-in-Chief of the RIBA's Journal of Architecture (2020-2021) and joint Editor-in-Chief of the ARENA Journal of Architectural Research (2022-2024).

In a previous career, I designed and brough to market the VR design review software Navisworks (now owned by autodesk).

Research

My research focuses on architecture and the media. In particular, I am writing a biography of AD magazine, to be published with Harvard Design Press (2026).


I also specialise in postwar British architecture, especially Brutalism and am interested in the back-stories of how architecture is produced - in particular the life stories of architects and their personal/professional entanglements. I am currently working on a monograph of Theo Crosby (with Alan Powers and Juliana Kei) and a sole-authored history of AD magazine from 1930 to 1992.

I contribute to and sit on the committee of the SAHGB Oral History of Architectural Historians project.


Current PhD students:

  • Ivan Márquez Muñoz, who is researching the work of Miguel Fisac through creative practice;
  • Ray Verrall, ‘Re-Positioning the Profession: The 1958 Oxford Conference and its Impact on Architectural Education’ (second supervisor with Adam Sharr)
  • Difei Shan, ‘Exhibiting China Around the World’ (second supervisor with Prof. Jianfei Zhu)
  • Lingfei Kong, ‘Towards Autonomy: The Discursive Space in Jianzhu Xuebao in China (1973-1984)’ (second supervisor with Prof. Jianfei Zhu)


Completed PhDs:

  • Alex Blanchard, ‘A glitch in the architect’s blue veil: writing a non-computational model of site’ (completed with minor corrections, 2023)
  • Ruth Lang, 'Towards an Architecture of Ingenuity: The Schools Division of the London County Council Architect’s Department, 1943-65' (completed with no corrections, January 2019)
  • Guanghui Ding, 'Constructing a place of critical architecture in China : a case study of the journal "Time Architecture"'. (Completed with minor corrections, 2013 at University of Nottingham, supervised with Jonathan Hale) 

 

I'd be particularly interested in supervising PhD students in the following areas:

  • The architectural media, both printed and digital;
  • Brutalist architecture;




Teaching

I teach across all stages into a variety of modules, but mostly architecture history and design and am currently leading ARC1015 (Introduction to Architecture) and ARC1018 (Architectural Representation 2).


Example design studios: 'Lost Futures' (adaptive reuse of Sunderland Civic Centre in BA stage 3), 'Early Days of a Better Nation' (on transhumanism in Rotterdam, with science fiction author Ken MacLeod)


I supervise BA and MArch dissertations, currently leading a BA group on 'Myth & Media'.


Linked Research, where MArch students work alongside research staff as associates, is unique to Newcastle and I have supervised projects on:

  • International Brutalisms (students went to USA, Brazil, Germany and India to understand the characteristics of Brutalism in those countries). Raphael Selby, in particular, has continued this research into his professional practice (http://pagepark.co.uk/article/brazilian-brutalism/);
  • Theo Crosby's house (students researched this house in Hammersmith and constructed 1:20 models of its iterations from its initial conversion in 1955 to its extensions in 1960, 1967 and 1987, through an understanding of the New Brutalist principles). Read about it in this paper.
  • Architecture through magazines: The Civilia Project (with Koldo Lus Arana, Zaragoza University)



Publications