Laura Mark
About me
Laura Mark is an award-winning architecture critic, curator, filmmaker and academic.
Through creative practices such as filmmaking, photography, curation and casting, Laura’s research explores domesticity, architectural experience, and feminist experiences of the domestic realm.
She currently co-leads undergraduate first year at Sheffield School of Architecture and has previously taught at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University of Greenwich and the Birmingham School of Architecture and Design and Sweden’s UMEA University.
Trained as an architect, Laura worked in architectural practice before joining the editorial team of the Architects’ Journal. She has also held curatorial positions at both Walmer Yard and the Royal Academy of Arts.
Personal Interest
As a researcher I am interested in the links between curation, the archives and creative practice.
Project Title
Experiencing architecture in the house-museum: An auto-ethnographical study of the phenomenology of the domestic realm in Walmer Yard
Project Description
My PhD research questions our complex relationship with home and with architecture, offering a study of the sensory experience of our domestic environments. It considers our experience of domestic spaces and the museumification of the home through an autoethnographic study of Walmer Yard.
Walmer Yard is a collection of four houses designed by the architect Peter Salter. Salter is best known for his drawings and teaching, and the houses are his only built work in the UK. They were commissioned by the developer Crispin Kelly, who himself had been Salter’s student at the Architectural Association. They are a rare work in demonstrating what can be built when a visionary client gives an architect creative freedom, and they explore how the language of domestic architecture can be pushed through their use of materials, textures, light and shadow
The houses went on to become the home of the Baylight Foundation, a charity which explores what architecture can do, rooted in the experience of Walmer Yard. Based in situated practice, the research for my PhD is influenced by my work as Keeper of Walmer Yard from 2018 – 2023, and draws upon the public programmes I curated within the houses as well as my own lived experience of them. My research involves critically assessing my own relationship to the building, while setting it in context as a home, public institution, lauded piece of architecture, and educational space.
Supervisors
Qualifications
- BA (Hons) Architecture (De Montfort University)
- Professional Diploma Architecture with Advanced Environmental and Energy Studies (Centre for Alternative Technology)
- PG Cert Research Methods (Newcastle University)
Conference Papers and Publications
Conferences:
- Architecture 101: Questioning the Fundamentals. Newcastle University, November 2023. Creative Practice Exhibition, Casting Walmer Yard
- AHRA International Conference: Ecologies of Care. Portsmouth University, October 2023. Title of Paper: Casting to Care: The Walls of Walmer Yard
- Thinkers for Architecture: Foucault/Merleau-Ponty/Latour. University of Manchester, May 2023. Title of Paper: Touring Walmer Yard through the lens of Merleau-Ponty and Foucault
Book chapters:
- Mark, L. Women in architecture awards - great or ghettoising?, in A Gendered Profession, ed. Harriss, H,. Morrow, R,. & Soane, J.(London: RIBA Publishing, 2017)
- Mark, L. Centre for Alternative Technology - questions rather than answers, in Radical Pedagogies Architectural Education and the British Tradition, ed. Harris, H., Froud, D. (London: RIBA Publishing, 2015)
Research Group Memberships
- Architecture Research Collaborative (Newcastle University)
- Space, Cultures, and Politics (University of Sheffield)
- Pedagogy, Practice and Scholarship (University of Sheffield)
Funding
ARQ Scholarship 2024
Contact
