DOCTORAL RESEARCH

Field work with Zoya Maksunova, Svetlana Korsakova, and Edward Adrian-Vallance on the Yenisei.  Part of the project CANTING FOR ARCHITECTS.

I am interested in how the ideas in narrative architecture become changed when works are re-told in different forms. That is, in exploring works of art and architecture that act as critical fictions – that provoke engagement with reality by suggesting alternative re-imaginings – and seeing how their concepts mutate or are re-interpreted when translated between visual and language-framed media.


My doctoral research, undertaken at the ETH in Zürich and in Krasnoârsk kraj in collaboration with Zoya Maksunova, explored the architectural fantasies of Ivan Leonidov and their discussion in the indigenous Siberian language Ket – a system of knowledge construction specific to the environment of the Enisej river, where Leonidov was sent to work on the design of the city of Igarka in 1931. What becomes most salient in an alternative, Ket-language apprehension of Leonidov’s utopia, given the varying means by which diverse languages grammatically frame event and (cultural) space?

In the dissertation produced, translated perspectives and alternative narratives become both tactics used by architects and ways to approach their work at odds. How are ideas are re-framed, perceptions re-calibrated, in translation?


Irúsan, the book that forms the outcome of the doctoral research project, is due to be published by the gta Verlag in Zürich in 2020.