Architecture and Landscape Research Group (Register)

Understanding, interpreting and enriching our built landscapes.

About Register

Register is a research group founded on a shared interest in how our cities and landscapes act as a register of human occupation and thinking over time – at once a laboratory and an archive. We are interested in the motivations, the readings and the implications that arise from these constructed habitats. We are interested in the contingency, doubt and joy of practice, and in the forms of knowledge that are found there. We aim to continually reinvigorated our disciplines by different readings of space and inhabitation that expand our understanding of the world. We are fascinated by how and why things are made, and by the consequences of this making. We understand architecture and landscape in their both temporal depth and their contemporary situation.

Our researchers design, write, speculate and make. Many have exhibited at the Venice Biennale, published seminal books, and received major international honours for their work. We act as an incubator of this knowledge and a platform for its articulation and dissemination. We organise lectures and PhD seminars, record podcasts and publish books that allow for the fullest articulation of these aspects to our wider community and into the taught programmes of the department of architecture and landscape.

Research degrees

We invite expressions of interest for our research degrees (PhD, MPhil, MA Res) year-round. We encourage you to contact us via our research degrees co-ordinator Dr Christoph Lueder. You can also browse our research degree supervisors and their work, below, and contact those relevant to your proposed project directly. Our supervisors support both written and practice-based projects in Architecture and Landscape, including cross-disciplinary research across KSA and KU.

As a research student at Kingston University, you will become part of a strong and ambitious postgraduate community. You will be fully supported by a rich programme of research training, including research workshops, seminars, guest lectures, symposia, and related activities organised through the research groups.

Research degree supervisors

Dr Andrew Clancy

Andrew is developing the Practice based PhD programme in Kingston and is interested in the contribution to knowledge made by the work of practitioners, and in how research methodologies can be used to support the critical formation of architects.
Dr Andrew Clancy
Dr Tom Coward

Tom is a Practice based researcher, his interests include considering the reciprocal roles of participation and conversation in both the lived production and the experiential realisation of architecture.
Dr Tom Coward
Dr Heba Elsharkawy

Heba is an expert in the area of environmental design and sustainability. She has been Principal Investigator to a British Council Newton Institutional Links project and currently is PI to a British Council towards Net Zero Carbon Campuses for Climate Change Mitigation and Resilience.
Dr Heba Elsharkawy
Dr Christoph Lueder

Christoph researches on representation and co-production of architectural space, irregular urbanisation, participatory and co-operative urbanism. He co-leads the British Council funded project About Making and the research project How to Build with Time? funded by the GCRF, RIBA and Graham Foundation.
Dr Christoph Lueder
Dr Bárbara Maçães Costa

Bárbara researches on environmental aesthetics in architecture. She is currently preparing a book manuscript entitled 'Objects and Landscapes, a Cartographic Mediation', which presents a synthesis of her research and teaching over the past decade.
Dr Bárbara Maçães Costa
Douglas Murphy

Douglas examines the relationship between concepts of nature and technology in 20th century architecture, post-war housing typologies, and architecture's role in visions of the future and ideological expression.
Douglas Murphy
Dr Alexandra Stara

Alexandra researches the hermeneutics of art, architecture and the modern museum. Her historical and philosophical investigations of architecture, its traditions, relationships with other arts and cultural role include particular interests in lens-based media and representation.
Dr Alexandra Stara
Dr Dimitris Venizelos

Dimitris is an architect, urban designer and geographer with research interests in cultural and political geography, urban design and development. He has previously researched at Harvard University, the National Technical University of Athens and is a Research Associate at MesArch Lab of the University of Cyprus.
Dr Dimitris Venizelos
Austin Williams

Austin is the director of the Future Cities Project and a specialist on Chinese Architecture and Urbanism. His book publications include China's Urban Revolution: Understanding Chinese Eco-cities and New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future.
Austin Williams