Lucy Bullivant Hon FRIBA is an architecture and design curator, critic, author and advisor born in London to architect parents who instilled a passion in her for the discipline she hasn't grown out of yet. Through her international exhibitions, conferences and publishing projects, public speaking and consultancy work she has consistently advocated higher design standards and experimental multidisciplinary strategies to help counter the negative effects of globalisation.
A cultural historian with a Master's degree from the Royal College of Art, she initially worked as an art curator and director of open art exhibitions. She launched her own company, Lucy Bullivant & Associates, in 1984, working internationally with leading museums, galleries, cultural institutions, publishers and corporate bodies. Her roles have included Heinz Curator of Architectural Programmes at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Guest Curator for Vitra Design Museum, Germany, Curator and British Commissioner at the XIX Triennale di Milano, and curator of several conferences at venues in London including Tate Modern, ICA, RIBA and the Royal College of Art. She is Renaissance Advocate to Yorkshire Forward (Renaissance Cities and Towns), a member of the Acquisitions Committee of the FRAC architecture centre, Orléans, France, and works as a specialist architectural expert witness in planning appeals.
Lucy is in demand internationally as a guest lecturer and chair of events for bodies including the V&A (2009/10), IAAC and FAD, Barcelona; Strelka Institute, Moscow; UCLA, Los Angeles; CCA, Montreal; Tate Modern; Barbican Art Gallery, London; the British Council, Napier University, Edinburgh, Sustain magazine (UK) and de Baak, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Her ground-breaking and successful exhibitions, conferences and talks feature exceptional international practitioners from a range of disciplines, and deal with issues relating to architecture's role as a social art; its 'new pragmatism'; alternative strategies for public housing design; responsive environments; children's environments within and beyond the Western world and inclusive design. Many of her exhibitions have toured globally including Space Invaders, for the British Council, and Kid size: the material world of childhood, for Vitra Design Museum, Germany. She has staged and chaired conferences including Softspace at Tate Modern (2007), Anglo Files: UK architecture's rising generation (RIBA, 2005), Home Front, on new housing design (Architectural Association, London, 2003), 4dspace (ICA, 2003; AA, 2005), Spaced Out III (ICA, 1997), the Archis series (RIBA, the AA, the Bartlett, the Photographers' Gallery, 1998-2001) and Shared Territories (RCA, 2006). She is currently curating two new exhibitions for European venues.
Lucy is a widely respected and internationally read critic and author in the field of architecture and urban design who investigates emergent modes of practice and their social effects. She is the author of Anglo Files: UK architecture's rising generation, an extensive analysis of young UK architects and their cultural and political context, which received an Arts Council of England grant (Thames & Hudson, Princeton Architectural Press and DVA, 2005). Her publications Responsive Environments: architecture, art and design (V&A Contemporary, 2006), 4dsocial and 4dspace (AD/Wiley, 2005, 2007) were the first of their kind to investigate the impact of interactive architecture and design. She has two texts in Digital Blur: creative practice at the boundaries of design, architecture and art, a multi-author publication, Libri, 2010.
Lucy is an architecture and urban design correspondent to Domus, The Plan, Volume, Indesign, a+u (from 2005 her feature series charted the relationship between urban design and landscape architecture) and Harvard Design Magazine and has written many essays for exhibition catalogues and, most recently, for the 2010 Audi Urban Futures Award. Her essay 'No More Tabula Rasa: Progressive Architecture Practices in England', was published in The New Architectural Pragmatism, A Harvard Design Magazine Reader, 5, 2007 (ed. William S. Saunders; essays by Kenneth Frampton, Alejandro Zaera-Polo, Stan Allen, Hal Foster et al), University of Minnesota Press. Her next books to be published will be Masterplanning Futures, supported by CABE (Routledge, 2012) and The New Arcadians (Merrell, 2012). Lucy was elected an Honorary Fellow of RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) in 2010.
January 2011
