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Staff Profile

Toby Blackman

Degree Programme Director BA (Hons) Architecture, Senior Lecturer

Background

Toby is an architect and artist conducting teaching and scholarship at the intersection of architecture, film and photography.


Toby developed expertise in architectural practice—specialising in design and specification writing—with Manser Medal winners Studio Bednarski and Robert Dye Associates, and the Stirling Prize nominated practice, Allies and Morrison. He has exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy Summer Exhibition, and his work was Highly Commended in the 2019 Blueprint Architecture Photography Awards, and 2022 Architecture Foundation Writing Prize: Writing as an Architectural Medium.


Toby studied Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, and Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, an Arts Emergency Mentor, and a member of the RIBA Validation Panel for Schools of Architecture.


Qualifications and Professional Affiliations

BA(Hons), BArch, MA (Dist.), PGCHE, ARB, RIBA, FHEA



Research

Toby is interested in an expanded field of practice. His research examines visual, material, textual architectures through site-writing, film, photography, and architectural practice. 


Toby has presented research at international conferences and symposia on the processes and practices of his transdisciplinary creative practice: Architectural History Workshop Lightning Rounds: Visual Representation in Architectural History Methodologies (The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain); Slices of Everyday Lives (University of Cambridge); It's Not too Late: Architects Against Climate Change (TU Delft); Mediated City: Moving Images - Static Spaces (Altinbas University, Istanbul). He has exhibited film at the Royal Scottish Academy Summer Exhibition in Edinburgh (The Machine, the Body and the Casket, 2000), drawings at Allies and Morrison’s Southwark Street studio gallery in London (By Hand, 2007), and spoken on photography at the Off-Centre Festival in Nottingham. Recent projects and publications include, ‘It’s Just a Matter of Time,’ performed as a live reading during the Bloomsbury Festival 2021 and published in Site-Reading Writing Quarterly (21 June, 2022), and ‘Berggasse 19: Spatialising the Subjects of Exile and Absence,’ published by the Architecture Foundation in 2023.

Teaching

Toby Blackman is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, and Director of the BA Architecture programme. He teaches design, history and theory, and architectural technology across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of architecture. 


Toby teaches a Stage 2 dissertation elective exploring the ways in which film and photography form situated spatial practice — and may both describe and narrate architecture over time. Drawing on the discourses of feminist film theory and site-writing, students explore the embodied, hidden and ambiguous experience of architectural temporality—the ways in which ‘we move,’ ‘walk around, live, work,’ and ‘sleep’ in cities, buildings, and rooms over time—and how we may examine this topic through the production, spectatorship and writing of film and photography. This elective supports dissertation studies examining architecture’s temporality through long-form research-writing, or creative practice (photography, film, and/or site-writing).

Publications