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Staff Profile

Toby Blackman

Degree Programme Director BA (Hons) Architecture, Senior Lecturer

Background

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

I 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. I have exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy Summer Exhibition, and my work was Highly Commended in the 2019 Blueprint Architecture Photography Awards, and the 2022 Architecture Foundation Writing Prize: Writing as an Architectural Medium.

I studied Architecture at the University of Edinburgh, and Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

I am a Fellow of the HEA, an Arts Emergency Mentor, and a member of the RIBA Validation Panel. 

Qualifications and Professional Affiliations

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

Research

I am interested in an expanded field of architecture. My research examines visual, material, textual architectures through situated practice, writing, and film. 

I have presented research at several international conferences and symposia on these processes, practices, and topics: 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). 

I have 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.

Teaching

I am the current BA Architecture Degree Programme Director in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. 

I teach design, history and theory, and architectural technology across the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes of architecture.

I teach a Stage 2 dissertation elective exploring the ways in which situated practices of film and photography both describe and narrate architecture over time. The theories, practices, and objects of film and photography are drawn into the teaching, enabling the embodied and ambiguous experience of buildings to be examined in the single frame, or at twenty-four frames per second. Dissertation studies explore the subject of architecture’s ‘social reproduction,’ ‘the way cities evolve,’ and ‘the way architecture itself changes’ through the objects, processes and practices of film and photography.

Publications