I make site-specific works as part of art and architecture collectives Fugitive Images and BREAK//LINE based in east London – , , – where I was born and live. My practice is a call to gather: forming unruly assemblies with caretakers, shopkeepers and school children; foraging for fallen leaves; and organising to dismantle hostile environments. I am uninterested in work without solidarity without shimmer.
I am Associate Professor at the Bartlett School of Architecture. My teaching and research addresses acts of openness: opening up the histories and futures of social housing in London; kindling an openness to challenge unethical built environment practices; and throwing research open to community groups whose homes and livelihoods are under threat from urban policy. I am driven to defend welfare state architecture and revive the principles at its foundation.
With Andrea Luka Zimmerman I co-wrote and co-produced the feature-length documentary/fiction film, Estate, a Reverie tracing the demolition of the Haggerston Estate in Hackney which was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2016 and received the Runner up Prize in the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2019. We co-curated Real Estates, opening PEER Gallery up as a social, discursive and imaginative space around issues of housing and spatial justice in East London through a constantly changing series of exhibitions, screenings, discussions, readings and workshops. Our work has been exhibited, performed, screened and presented at Tate Modern, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA, Somerset House, De La Warr Pavilion and National Gallery of Lithuania.
With Thandi Loewenson, Miranda Critchley, Thom Callan-Riley, and Sayan Skandarajah I coordinated the project UNBUILDING to create collective readings of experiences of hostility in institutional cultures and practices, forming an act of public hearing - bringing these hostilities to the fore and enacting a different politics in the process.
With Duarte Carrilho da Graça I developed the interactive website A Building Archive as part of a three year resident-led campaign for Balfron Tower in Poplar to remain a beacon for social housing. My PhD in Architectural Design Make Public developed collaborative performances of archives with estate residents to reawaken emancipatory ideas and spaces. It won the RIBA President’s Award for Research 2016.
With Jane Rendell and Yael Padan I designed the open access website Practising Ethics which seeks to raise awareness, expand understanding, and collectively develop approaches of ethical practice specific to built environment researchers and practitioners. My paper Reflect Critically and Act Fearlessly reframing ethics away from a regulatory hurdle and towards a means to enrich architectural practice through reflexive curiosity and critical investigation was commended by the RIBA President’s Awards for Research 2018. With Jane Rendell, Yael Padan, Ariana Markowitz, and Emmanuel Osuteye I developed a series of practising ethics guides Will I Cause Harm? which won the RIBA President’s Award for Research 2021.
With Amy Brookes I design activities encouraging primary and secondary school children into architectural education. Our long-term project Schools Without Walls with Fiona MacDonald and Kieran Mahon encourages primary school pupils in Lambeth to co-design and self-build their own learning pavilions. I support BSc, MArch and MA students to devise socially engaged site-specific performances, nurture forms of collaboration and collectivity, initiate action research with community grops, devise situated protocols setting out ethical terms of engagement, and write manifestoes to define what practitioners they seek to become. My students have won the RIBA Dissertation Medal and the Bartlett’s Dissertation Prize, Trevor Sprott Prize, and Fifteen Award, and my teaching has been nominated and shortlisted by students in awards for Outstanding Teaching, Diverse and Inclusive Education, Exceptional Feedback, Amazing Support Staff, and Brilliant Research-based Education.
Current
Arnold Pumpkin is a children's picturebook in verse telling a pumpkin’s eye perspective on a thousand-year social and architectural history of the same East London patch - site of the most notorious Victorian slum later demolished and rebuilt as the world’s first council housing. Developed with and illustrated by Sing Yun Lee, the story is in equal parts rigorous and fantastical told exclusively through all the flora and fauna who have ever lived on site. A companion graphic novel, taking the form of an archival scrapbook for adults, reveals the historical references underpinning each double-page spread of the picturebook, challenging singular readings of history and fables. Arnold Pumpkin is a story about grasping landlords, ungracious paternalism and gutsy resistance told by a striped pumpkin who just wants to grow as his home (and his hat) are transformed by slum dragons, anarcho-communist terriers, proselytising canaries and squatting geese.
Held is a series of site-specific kinetic installations of alder, ash, beech, black locust, cherry, elm, gingko, hornbeam, lime, maple, oak, plane, rowan, sweet chestnut, sweet gum, sycamore, and whitebeam leaves collected from east London as a memorial to local residents. The first iteration, Fall is an installation of 85 mobiles made from fallen leaves of ginkgo trees and dropped branches of birch trees. Fall honours GG, my neighbour, an east end shopfitter who died aged 85 after falling on the ice on a street lined with ginkgo and birch trees. The mobiles attend to the moment of falling — gravity, time and loss suspended — and the act of holding what has been and is still broken. Fall was exhibited in a series of east London shops.
Practising Ethics is an open access collaborative website developed with Jane Rendell, Yael Padan and over 30 contributors bringing together a lexicon of key ethical principles, guidelines on how to negotiate ethical issues in practice, reading lists of publications that focus on specific ethical themes, overviews of ethics protocols, and case studies which reflect on ethical experiences and processes. We are co-authoring a companion book Practising Ethics: A Poethic Infrastructure for Architectural and Urban Researchers to be published in 2026. We update the website annually, we are keen to hear from anyone who would like to work through their ethical experiences with us.
Archiving to Destroy is an investigation into, on the one hand, the iniquitous processes of culture-led regeneration which increasingly funds local archival activities to record the history of these communities in order to justify their dismantling, and on the other, the radical practices of activist groups who seek to tear down these processes and institutions. This builds upon ongoing projects such as: Archive as Commonplace led by Jos Boys opening up architectural, building and place-based collections which seeks to reimagine methods, modes of collaboration, forms of participation, possible uses and different kinds of legacies; and the New Architecture Movement Legacy Group which gathers architectural activists to respond and update the digital archives of NAM which sought to ensure that tenants were involved in the design of their homes, that the practice of architecture became more inclusive and the public interest was better recognised by its governing institutions.
Prefigurative Spatial Research draws from a decade of teaching engaged action research projects in which I ask students to model the changes they wish to see in their research approach - a consistency of means and ends - and develop a double vision - the process of radical imagining which looks from the present to the future and then from the future back, a positional relay to help initiate collective action to build a better world by unbuilding this one in the present.
The Best of London is a photography and oral history project celebrating and seeking to unionise shopkeepers across the capital: Best Kebab, Best Foods, Best Skips, Best Granite, Best Look, Best Moon Shop, Best Carpets, Ever Best, Best Cakes, Best Sellers, Best Halal Meat, Best Bunk Beds, Best Wines, Best Fitted Wardrobe, With Best Wishes, Best Price, Biggie Best, Best A Level Results, Best Book Shop, Best in Antiques, Best Practice Bookstore, Best of Both Boutique, Best Oil Store, Best Implants, Best Authentic Indian, Taste The Best, Best Decor London, Best Memorials, Best Desk, Best Water Purifiers, Best Pizza, Best Event, Your Best Local Electrician, Best Scaffolding, Best Learning Support, Best Watch Repairs, Best Paw Forward Dog Training Club, Best Psychic London, Best Masters, Best Astrologer, Best AM 2 PM, Best Chicken, Best Hand Car Wash in UK, My Best Windows, The Caribbean Best Take Away, Best Roller Shutter Repair, Best Gift Direct, Best Deals, Best Flooring Fitters London, Best Value Locally, Best Morley’s, Best Motor, Best Fish Bar, Best Cafe, Best Fireworks Direct, Best London Removals.
CV
Practice & research
BREAK//LINE, architecture collective
A project with Thom Callan-Riley, Miranda Critchley, Thandi Loewenson and Sayan Skandarajah opposing the trespass of capital, the indifference towards inequality and the myriad frontiers of oppression present in architectural education and practice
Research Ethics Fellow, Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment, UCL
Led by Professor Jane Rendell, the Bartlett Ethics Commission involves identifying key ethical issues and dilemmas in built environment research alongside developing a vision, code and resources to guide the practice of ethics in teaching and research
Fugitive Images, co-director of collaborative art practice
A not-for-profit cultural collective with Andrea Luka Zimmerman working across media and platforms concerned with issues of social justice and co-existence, employing creative waywardness, hybridity and collaboration
Involve, co-founder of architecture collective
A not-for-profit collective with Amy Butt seeking to extend architectural education to primary and secondary school children through performance, model-making, design and build projects
Teaching
Associate Professor, Bartlett School of Architecture
BSc Architecture — convenor of seminar programme Housing Acts and dissertation supervisor on History and Theory of Architecture
BSc Architectural and Interdisciplinary Studies module co-coordinator on Architectural Research II; dissertation supervisor on Architectural Research III
MA Situated Practice module coordinator on Research Methods, design tutor on Site-Writing and Major Project
MArch Architecture thesis supervisor on Advanced Architectural Thesis
PG Dip Professional Practice in Architecture lecturer on Professionalism
Visiting Lecturer, Central St Martins
MArch Architecture & MA Cities Spatial Practices ethics tutor
Guest Lecturer, Critic, and External Reviewer
Architectural Association, Bartlett School of Architecture, Central St Martins, Chelsea College of Art, Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, Newcastle University, Queen Mary University of London, Royal College of Art, University of Brighton, University of East London, University of Greenwich, Yale
Select projects
Fall
An installation of 85 mobiles made from fallen leaves of ginkgo trees and dropped branches of birch trees exhibited in shops across east London. It honours GG, my neighbour, an east end shopfitter who died aged 85 after falling on the ice on a street lined with ginkgo and birch trees.
Practising Ethics, Bartlett Ethics Commission
An open access website seeking to raise awareness, expand understanding, and collectively develop approaches of ethical practice specific to built environment researchers and practitioners
PiraMMMida, Perverting the Power Vertical
A transdisciplinary, transmedia project devoted to ridiculing, tricking, twisting, queering, resisting and perverting hierarchies in architecture, art, academia and the everyday
Unbuilding, BREAK//LINE
A project to investigate the spatial representations, practices and experiences of hostile environments in higher education leading to a set of ‘readings’ of the failings of institutions; of sites and practices which must be dismantled; and of existing, nascent and yet-to-be-realised modes which should be celebrated, supported, and imagined
Select projects continued
Involve: Schools Without Walls, De La Warr Pavilion & Orchard Primary, Lambeth
A long-term engagement with 25 primary school pupils to explore open-air schools and collaborate to imagine, interpret, perform, design and self-build their own learning spaces
Co-Designing Common Spaces, De La Warr Pavilion
A project in which principles and approaches of co-design were developed with Syrian refugees and local partners by sketching ideas, composing settings and enacting spatial dynamics
Estate: a reverie, Fugitive Images. 83 min feature film, LUX artists’ moving image agency.
A documentary/fiction tracking the passing of the Haggerston Estate and utopian promise of social housing interweaving portraits with historical re-enactments and architectural studies
Real Estates, Fugitive Images, PEER Gallery
Exhibition addressing issues spatial justice through a constantly changing series of exhibitions, screenings, discussions, readings and workshops
Balfron Tower: a building archive
An online archive of 120 documents comprising architectural archives, books, plans, films, and resident interviews of Balfron Tower spanning 50 years
Publications
Rendell, J., Padan, Y. & Roberts, D. Practising Ethics: A Poethic Infrastructure for Architectural and Urban Researchers, Forthcoming: UCL Press
Luka Zimmerman, A. & Roberts, D. 'Enduring Symbols of People and Place', in Flint-Nicol, K. & O'Neill, D., Beyond the Council Estate: Cinematic Space(s) of the Working-Class, Forthcoming: University of Edinburgh Press
Roberts, D. 'Apatura iris', in Bancroft, O., Music for a While
Brookes, A., MacDonald, F., Mahon, K. & Roberts, D. 'Schools without Walls', in Antaki, N., Ashton, M., Brandão, E., Brolund de Carvalho, S., Göthlund, A., Kautsky, M., Krasny, E., Reisinger, K., M. Salama, A., Schalk, M. & Talevi, R. Learnings/Unlearnings: Environmental Pedagogies, Play, Policies, and Spatial Design, Urgent Pedagogies, v.43
Roberts, D. 'We felt very magnificent being up there', in Drozdz, M., Harris, A. & Télémaque, N. (eds.) Urban Pamphleteer #11: Multi-stories: Estate Interventions in London and Paris, Northampton: Belmont Press
‘BREAK//LINE,’ and ‘Practising Ethics,’ in Day, K., Deamer, P., Dietz, A., Forde, T., Garcia Fritz, J., Geraki, P. & Lechene, V. (co-edited/authors) The Organiser’s Guide to Architectural Education, London: Routledge, 2024.
Rendell, J., Padan, Y. & Roberts, D., with Marcowitz, A. & Osuteye, E. 'Practising ethics: processes and principles', in Bobic, N. & Haghighi, F. (eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Vol II: Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities, London: Routledge
Maksimov, D., Mileeva, M., Murawski, M. & Roberts, D. 'Making Pyramids Disappear: Faux Horizontalism and Wild Capitalist Topologies of Speculation', in Vishmidt, M. Documents of Contemporary Art: Speculation, London: Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, pp. 147-156
Roberts, D. 'All that is Solid Melts into Air', in Pook, J., Schtinter, S. & Smith, J., Blight Soundtrack
Roberts, D. '"The Practice of Taking a Position Towards the World": Designing Manifesto Workshops', in Thomas, A., Novas Ferradás, M. & Rocco, R. (eds.), Teaching Design For Values: Concepts, Tools & Practices, Delft: TU Delft OPEN, pp. 174-192
Roberts, D., Marcowitz, A., Osuteye, E, Padan, Y. & Rendell, J. 'Practising Ethics: Guides for Built Environment Research', Journal of Architecture, v. 27, n. 5-6, pp. 637-707.
Roberts, D. 'Making Images' and 'Staging Research', Practising Ethics Guides to Built Environment Research
Rendell, J. with Cavelier, E., Chamberlain, S., Cham, S., Chen, Y., Docherty, R., El-Taliawi, A., Kärpänen, S., Kuenberg, K., Marino, F., Markou, O., Mazzari, L., Papachristou, A., Sainsot-Reynolds, R., Roberts, D., Salazar, D., Vincent, H., Zhou, F. & Žnidaršic, V. 'Selvedges/Self-edges', in Strauss, C. F., Slow Spatial Reader: Chronicles of Radical Affection, Amsterdam: Valiz, pp. 146-159
Roberts, D. 'Empathy Empathy Empathy Empathy Empathy Empathy Empathy: on ethics', CSM MArch Review
Publications continued
Roberts, D. 'Working Through and Working Towards: how to write an architectural manifesto', in Rocco, R., Newton, C., Vergara d’Alençon, L.Z., van der Watt, A., Babu, G., Caradonna, G., Tellez, N., Subendran, J., di Gioia, L. & Pessoa, I.T. (eds.) A Manifesto for the Just City. Delft: The Delft University of Technology
Castan-Broto, V., Padan, Y., Roberts, D. & Rendell, J. 'A "Minifesta" and the Promise of Collective Voice', Axon: Creative Explorations, v. 10, n. 2.
Roberts, D. ‘Why Now?: The Ethics of Architectural Declaration’, Architecture and Culture, v. 9, n. 4, pp. 587-605.
Roberts, D. ‘Reflect Critically and Act Fearlessly: A Survey of Ethical Codes, Guidance and Access in Built Environment Practice’, Bartlett Ethics Commission
Butt, A. & Roberts, D. ‘Narrative Arcs’, in Duman, A., Hancox, D., James, M. & Minton, A. (eds.) Regeneration Songs: Sounds of Investment and Loss from East London, London: Repeater Press, pp. 446-469
Roberts, D. ‘Housing Acts: performing public housing’, in Filmer, A. & Rufford, J. (eds.) Performing Architectures: Contemporary Projects, Practices and Pedagogies, London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, pp. 125-142
Roberts, D. ‘Make Public: Performing Public Housing in Ernö Goldfinger’s Balfron Tower’, Journal of Architecture, v. 22, n. 1, pp. 123-150
Roberts, D. ‘“We felt magnificent being up there”: Ernö Goldfinger's Balfron Tower and the campaign to keep it public’, in Guillery, P. & Kroll, D. (eds.) Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past, London: RIBA Publishing, pp. 141-162
Roberts, D. ‘Three Demands', RIBA Journal
Rendell, J. & Roberts, D. ‘Ethical Encounters’, The Bartlett Review
Roberts, D. et al. ‘From “Heroin” to Heroines’, in Campkin B. & Duijzings G. (eds.) Engaged Urbanism: Cities and Methodologies, London: IB Tauris, pp. 73-82
Roberts, D. ‘Make Public: a building archive of London’s Balfron Tower’, in Beebeejaun Y. (ed.) The Participatory City, Berlin: Jovis, pp. 65-73
Roberts, D. ‘None of the Lively Detail’, in Padilha E. & Khonsari T. (eds.) My Home is Your Home, London: public works, pp. 18-29
Schmidt, T. et al. ‘Beyond Glorious: The Radical in Engaged Practices’, Contemporary Theatre Review, v. 24, n. 2, pp. 284-288
Kenniff, T.B., Parreño, C., Pestana, M., Roberts, D. & Willkens, D. ‘Lobby foreward’, in Lobby, London: Aldgate Press
Roberts, D. ‘Telling Stories / Empty Words Build Empty Homes’, Opticon1826, v. 17, n. 16
Campkin, B., Roberts, D. & Ross, R, eds. Urban Pamphleteer #2: Regeneration Realities, Northampton: Belmont Press
Roberts, D. & Thomas, A. ‘Harmony and Discord’, in PhD Research Projects 2013 (London: Bartlett School of Architecture)
Cook, I. et al. ‘What is geography’s contribution to making citizens?’, Geography, v. 93 n. 1, pp. 34-39
Cook, I., Evans, J., Griffiths, H., Mayblin, L., Payne, B. & Roberts, D. ‘“Made in…?" appreciating the everyday geographies of connected lives?’, Teaching Geography, v. 32, n. 2, pp. 80-83
Public talks & guest lectures
Crafting the good, again and again, Keynote, Sheffield School of Architecture
Learnings/Unlearnings: Environmental Pedagogies, Play, Policies, and Spatial Design, with Brookes, A., Mahon, K. & McDonald, F., KTH School of Architecture & Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Färgfabriken, Sweden
Ethical Engagement, Scottish Graduate School for Arts & Humanities
Art Class Manifesto, Antiuniversity
Reflect Critically, Act Fearlessly, GTAS Braunschweig
Fieldstations, TU Berlin
Structures of Community, Brighton CCA
Activating Social Housing Archives and Other Memory Works, University of Copenhagen
New Architecture Movement Archive Launch, Bartlett School of Architecture
Space of Waste, Bartlett Together Festival, Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
Experimental Methodologies, Sussex University
Sustained, Dialogic, Iterative, Independent, Action-oriented, and Imaginative, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm and TU Munich
Ethics in Research Practice, KNOW Project, UCL
Archive as Commonplace, Barbican and Bartlett School of Architecture
Ecopoetics, Bartlett Together Festival, Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment
Uncommon Walks, Pedestric Radicals, Architectural Association
Unfinished Symphonies, Bartlett, UCL & Wits University
Future Practice, Royal College of Art
Speculative Ethics, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm and TU Munich
On Site, InSITE, Royal College of Art
Dust FM, with Loewenson, T., Dialogues with Dust, Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg
Teaching Design for Values, Design for Values Institute, TU Delft
Why now?, Architecture & Collective Life, Architectural Humanities Research Association
Open Learning Spaces, De La Warr Pavilion
Co-designing Common Spaces, De La Warr Pavilion
Craggy Bleakness and Tenacity, Centre for Alternative Technology
Confessionals, In Permanent Readiness for the Marvelous, Bartlett School of Architecture PhD Research Projects
Dialogues on Urban Equality: the Ethics of Urban Research Practice, Knowledge in Action for Urban Equality, Senate House
Spatial Engagement Sessions - Ideas for Civic Action, Tate Exchange
Multistory, Canterbury School of Architecture, UCA
Polimi London, Politecnico di Milano
Judgment Calls, Bartlett School of Architecture
School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens
Uncommon, Spike Island, Bristol
Are You Sitting Comfortably?, Canterbury School of Architecture, UCA
Critical Written Reflection, Aarhus School of Architecture
Passagens, Chelsea College of Art
Situating Architecture, Bartlett School of Architecture
Art Practices & the Housing Crisis, Manchester People's History Museum
My Home is Your Home, The Showroom Gallery
Estate, a Reverie, Exeter University
Public talks & guest lectures continued
Estate, a Reverie, ICA
Architecture in the Expanded Field, National Art Gallery, Vilnius
Estate, a Reverie, City Centre, Queen Mary University
Estate, a Reverie, Tate Modern
Practising Ethics in Built Environment Research Conference, The Bartlett, UCL
The Work of Art in the Age of Urban Cannibalism, Goldsmiths University
London Theatre Seminar, Senate House
London Metropolitan History Seminar, Senate House
MirrorCity, Hayward Gallery
International Federation for Theatre Research Conference, Warwick University
Oral History Society Conference, Manchester University
Open School East, Rose Lipman Centre, De Beauvoir Town
Urban Lab +, Wits University, Johannesburg
Performative Reexistences, Italian Cultural Institute
Mobilising London's Housing Histories: The Provision of Homes since 1850, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House
Stylistic Dead Ends? Fresh Perspectives on British Architecture Between the World Wars, St John's College, Oxford University
Beyond Glorious: The Radical in Engaged Practices, Birkbeck
Open House 2013: Collective Action on the Housing Crisis Facing People Across London
CitiesMethodologies, Slade Research Centre
Bartlett Research Exchange, UCL
PhD Research Projects Exhibition, Bartlett School of Architecture, Wates House, UCL
Sheffield University Architecture Society lecture series, Sheffield
PLACE: Roots - Journeying Home, Aldeburgh Festival, Snape
John Berger: Art and Property Now exhibition, Somerset House
Open House Weekend
Estate, Whitechapel Gallery
CitiesMethodologies, Slade Research Centre
Open City Documentary Festival, UCL
One Day in the City - Festival of London and Literature, UCL
ART/E/FACT, Stour Space
Common Grounds Conference, Sheffield Architecture School
StadtKolloquium Conference, UCL
Step Forward & Network, Haggerston Community Centre
Shoreditch Festival, Shoreditch Trust Information Point, Haggerston
Conversations at the Elephant, Studio at the Elephant, Elephant and Castle
Visionary Trading Project, Guest Projects, Hackney
CitiesMethodologies, Slade Research Centre