About

Chris Abel is an award winning author and internationally known theorist and educator on interdisciplinary approaches to architecture and environmental issues. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture (1968) in London, he first achieved international prominence with a series of groundbreaking essays published in Architectural Design shortly after graduation. In his essays he explored such subjects as self-organizing urban systems and computer based methods of architectural production, anticipating many cutting edge developments in design theory and building technology.

His teaching and research career began in the same period at Portsmouth School of Architecture (1971-78) and in 1973-74 he spent a semester as Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group (the forerunner of MIT’s Media Lab), where he created ARCHITRAINER, an interactive program simulating architect-client dialogues. There followed an intensive period of travel and research into the architecture of different cultures, when he taught at major universities around the world, including: Canada (1978); the USA (1979-81); Malaysia (1981-82); Saudi Arabia (1982-85); Singapore (1985-86) and Turkey (1988-89). The outcome was a series of new teaching programs and essays in The Architectural Review and other journals propagating a modern regionalism based upon both local and global sources. He also became a regular participant in the activities of the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, both as an official nominator for the Award - he has nominated several winners – and speaker at AKAA seminars.

In 1989 he returned to the UK where he taught at the Universities of Dundee and Nottingham, further developing and expounding his radical approach to design education in his writings until 1997, when he retired from full-time teaching. Henceforth he worked as an independent scholar and writer from his home in Malta - his semi-permanent residence or ‘base-camp’ since 1983. He continued to travel widely and was sponsored on conferences and lecture tours in the Far East by the Commonwealth Association of Architects and the British Council. In 2003, at Norman Foster’s request, he also worked as co-curator with Foster on the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition, “Sky High-Vertical Architecture”, for which he wrote an accompanying book by the RA of the same title.

In 2004, sponsored by the late Australian architect Harry Seidler he immigrated to Australia under the special category of Distinguished Talent (he gained his Australian citizenship in 2007). There he taught at both the University of Sydney and the University of New South Wales where he ran his Vertical Architecture STudio (VAST), an innovative research and design program on new urban topologies that has been widely published in Australian, American and Chinese journals. He also continued to teach and lecture in other countries and was selected by the University of Nebraska Lincoln as Hyde Chair of Excellence in Architecture for 2008. Throughout these years he also pursued his over-arching investigation of the broader evolutionary and cognitive basis for human-environment interactions and in 2012 he was awarded a PhD by the University of Sydney for his doctoral thesis, The Extended Self - Architecture, Memes and Minds. He returned to Europe the same year to live in Northern Ireland, where he was appointed Honorary Visiting Professor at Belfast School of Architecture, Ulster University. In 2017, he resettled in France where he now lives in the Paris suburb of Champigny sur Marne.

Dr. Abel is the author of over 140 publications covering a wide range of environmental issues and disciplines, from the criticism of specific architects and movements to theoretical discourses on the evolutionary impacts of technology on human development and the embodied mind. In addition to those already mentioned above his major published works include: two collections of his own essays, Architecture and Identity - Responses to Cultural and Technological Change (Architectural Press 1997; 2000; Routledge 2015 3rd ed.), and Architecture, Technology and Process (Architectural Press 2004); two new chapters for the centennial edition of Sir Bannister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture (Architectural Press, 1996); the six-volume series of monographs, Norman Foster – Works 1-6 (Prestel 2004-2013), for which he was a principle writer; introductions and other contributions to several monographs on the works of Harry Seidler and the Maltese architect Richard England, and guest editor for a special edition of The Architectural Review on Southeast Asia (September 1994). In 2017 an international jury led by the distinguished critic Joseph Rykwert unanimously voted the expanded version of his PhD thesis The Extended Self (Manchester University Press, 2015) the International Committee of Architectural Critics’ Bruno Zevi Book Award. He continues a busy writing schedule from his new home in France and is currently working on two new books: a theoretical study advancing the ideas put forward in The Extended Self, and a history of architecture and urbanism.

Chris Abel is an award winning author and internationally known theorist and educator on interdisciplinary approaches to architecture and environmental issues. A graduate of the AA School of Architecture (1968) in London, he first achieved international prominence with a series of groundbreaking essays published in Architectural Design shortly after graduation. In his essays he explored such subjects as self-organizing urban systems and computer based methods of architectural production, anticipating many cutting edge developments in design theory and building technology.

His teaching and research career began in the same period at Portsmouth School of Architecture (1971-78) and in 1973-74 he spent a semester as Visiting Scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with Nicholas Negroponte’s Architecture Machine Group (the forerunner of MIT’s Media Lab), where he created…

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