Liam Ross
BA (Hons) Architectural Design, University of Edinburgh, MArch, University of Edinburgh

Architecture: School of Arts, Culture and Environment (ACE)
The University of Edinburgh
Room 4.08
20 Chambers Street
EH1 1JZ Edinburgh, Scotland
United Kingdon

email: lro@staffmail.ed.ac.uk

Profile

Liam Ross studied at Edinburgh University and the Architecture Association, and is a registered architect.  He has experience of practice in Edinburgh through work with Malcolm Fraser Architects, leading and assisting on projects across the UK at a range of stages, from detailed to urban design.  He has worked in London and New York and is familiar with global commercial practice, leading projects in the USA, Russia and UAE.   As a member of The Company of Dancers he won first prize in the USA Institute International Competition for Brooklyn Heights River Promenade, New York. He has worked at Edinburgh University since 2004 as a Design Tutor, Course Organiser and Lecturer and has taught internationally with ArchiPrix International and Tong-Chi University, Shanghai.  Besides his research interests he contributes journalistic work to major UK and international publications.

Research Interests

Compliant Architecture

Compliance with regulation is an increasing and pressing requirement of professional practice through which architecture and architects are engaged as instruments of law.  Combined with the imperative of economy, the agency of the discipline can appear reduced to that of a service provision.  However, because regulation points to and puts measure against traumatic architectural issues – the scale of the body, the relation to the neighbour, the environmental cost of building – it also provides a language through which architects and architecture can assert their own imperative.  Current studio practice concerns design research into the architectural-linguistic potential of the UK Building Control regulations.

Traumatic Architecture

Contemporary architectural design practice is often pre-occupied with the automation of design, seeming to sidestep the question of representation, presenting us directly with the ‘Real Thing’; the genius of the architect (Gehry); the performativity of building (Schumacher).  However, these practices depend upon increasingly sophisticated modes of mediation; the approach to the Real requires a perverse increase in virtualisation.  Theories of the unconscious, particularly Lacan’s concept of the Real, help to frame this apparent contradiction and reveal a persistent representational content within the architecture of the Informe.

Publications

'The Excess of Unthinking Material', included in The Critique of the New, AA Press, London, Forthcoming.

'The Excess of Unthinking Material', included in ReMapping Tectonics, TU/E, Eindhoven, Forthcoming.

'What is That Thing on Your Waterfront', included in EAR, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2008

'What is That Thing on Your Waterfront', included in Scroope 18, University of Cambridge; 2006

Contributed journalistic pieces to Archi-Ned, Blueprint, & Prospect magazines.