Lecture by Bob Sheil

Bob Sheil is an educator and experimental designer focused on transgressions between making, craft and technology in architectural design practice. He is an architect and Director of The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, where he is Professor in Architecture and Design through Production.

Sheil studied architecture at Dublin Institute of Technology (1982-1985) and The Bartlett School of Architecture (1989-1994). With Nick Callicott, Ayres, Chris Leung and Emmanuel Vercruysse, he is a partner in sixteen*(makers), whose work includes 55/02 at Kielder Forest, a shelter designed and made in collaboration with Stahlbogen GmbH, which received a RIBA award for in 2011 for design. Sheil has authored many books, refereed papers, and articles on design, making and technology. He has co-designed and built six significant projects and been internationally exhibited on 11 occasions.

He has edited five books, including three issues of Architectural Design: "Design through Making" (2005), "Protoarchitecture" (2008), "High Definition: Zero Tolerance in Design and Production" (2014). In 2011, Sheil co-chaired the international conference FABRICATE with Ruairi Glynn, with whom he edited a parallel publication. In 2014 he founded the Protoarchitecture Lab, developing collaborative research between making, performance and laser scanning, in collaboration with the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and ScanLAB Projects.

This talk will firstly set out the basis of a body of work that began in the 1990s when architectural practice was adjusting to new found access to digital technologies, previously in the exclusive domain of advanced manufacturing. It will then cover the period of subsequent transgressions between the drawn and the made as designers began to grasp the potential of seamlessness production between both domains. Design through Production heralds the world where designers are makers and the full scope of their skill and knowledge as visionaries is connected to advanced means of production.

For more information, please contact [email protected].