Dr Thandi Loewenson is an architectural designer/researcher who operates through design, fiction and performance to interrogate our perceived and lived realms and to speculate on the possible worlds in our midst. Using fiction as a design tool and tactic, she engages in projects which provoke questions, whilst working with communities, policy makers, artists and architects towards acting on those provocations. Thandi holds a PhD in Architectural Design from The Bartlett, UCL, through which she developed these ideas through practice-led research, exploring the extractive agendas driving the urban development of Lusaka.

Thandi’s practice – 'weird and tender' – develops architectural interpretations of the ‘weird’ which are made ‘tender’ through care afforded to their deployment.  From unearthing to the unearthly, through research investigating the spatial politics of architecture, procurement and Outer Space, Thandi’s work links theories of extraction, property and racialised subjectivities towards understanding and undoing the entangled exclusionary dynamics at play in each. To date, outputs range from policy documents, films, drawings, performances and curated exhibitions to the excavation of a spaceship from a city landfill.

Thandi is a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, a Visiting Professor at the Aarhus School of Architecture, a ‘Roving Hybrid’ at the Graduate School of Architecture and a co-foundress of the architectural collective BREAK//LINE.

Dr David Roberts is a Teaching Fellow in Design and History & Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture and Research Ethics Fellow at the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment. Alongside his teaching and research, he is part of collaborative art practice Fugitive Images and of architecture collectives Involve and Break//Line.

David’s research, art and cultural activist practice engages community groups whose homes and livelihoods are under threat from urban policy, empowers ethical reasoning in built environment practice, and extends architectural education to primary and secondary school children.

Through this collaborative practice David co-wrote and co-produced the feature-length documentary/fiction film Estate, a Reverie; co-curated the exhibition Real Estates, opening PEER Gallery up as a social, discursive and imaginative space around issues of spatial justice; developed an interactive website A Building Archive and co-coordinated a successful campaign to list Balfron Tower at Grade II*. His PhD thesis in Architectural Design Make Public, explored the history and future of two east London housing estates facing demolition and privatisation. This 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.