SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ Thank you so much, Perla and André, for joining today to talk about your research on the ocean. I understand that you know each other already, through this as-yet niche interest in fishing architectures.

ANDRÉ TAVARES Perla, it’s good to see you. How are you, and what have you been up to?

PERLA GÍSLADÓTTIR Hi André, happy to see you too! I am an architect now — and I am good, thank you. I finished my thesis last summer: I drew a proposal for marine protected areas around Iceland. Then I received a grant for research on corals around Iceland – and I’m still active in the Icelandic Young Environmentalists (UU). Somehow it all led me on an inspiring journey to France – with Björk – who has been an activist longer than I’ve been alive, and has in her way of combining art and activism, been a huge role model.

It was quite beautiful; she was working on an installation for the Pompidou, a Nature Manifesto, but she didn’t only want to “talk the talk but walk the walk”. So she approached UU to help her get young local (French) activists involved – they are on track to ban bottom-net trawling within the marine protected areas in France. It sounds like a bare minimum, but it's actually a huge deal – because on paper, France has met the global goal of at least 30% marine protection by 2030 — I think they are at around 33% — but the level of protection is so low that they are not really protected at all. It's called a marine-protected area but then they allow a tremendously destructive fishing method within it — it’s essentially “paper parks”.

In Iceland, it’s the opposite: we have embarrassingly little area protected already — only 0.07% of our EEZ, which is why I did my thesis project on the topic — but it’s properly protected and respected. So in Iceland we need to protect more, but in France they have to protect better. And it is incredibly important, because France has the largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ) in the world after the US, covering vast parts of the world's oceans. That was the long answer to what I’ve been up to!

KOOZ In one slice, Perla, you take us through your research and onto global policy — also into a really interesting way of projecting space onto the globe. Let me invite André to describe how he came across your work and to tell us about his research too.

AT We met in Iceland, at a workshop for the Fishing Architecture research project in Ísafjörður. It was one of these strange occasions marking the contact of southern Europeans with Icelandic weather: there was a storm forecast but instead of waiting for it to pass, Perla said, “Let's get out before the storm.” I found that fascinating, in terms of the relationship with things that we can't control — but that in some respects, we can predict.

The workshop was a very intense and concentrated week around the fisheries in Ísafjörður, an old village in the western fjords; it dealt with many aspects of the ‘fishing architecture’ research, not only with the buildings, but also with fish — with cod. Specifically, it was called Cod Communities and Construction, and Perla had a very straightforward and attentive approach. I was fascinated by the way that she deployed her architectural knowledge within the ocean space in terms of facing the future, using architectural tools to map and conceptualise the ocean as a space that needs care. It was not a conventional architectural approach of how to build — rather connecting this idea of creating protected areas in ecological environments. We see the world through human or rational eyes, which is not exactly how it functions: fish don't know where the protected area begins or ends; the storm definitely doesn’t know. Yet these kind of entanglements of dynamic systems — of the oceans and precise systems of planning and conceptualising the space — made me think that we should continue this conversation.

KOOZ Can you use that to relate to your own larger research around architecture and fish, André?

AT Well, I'm not an activist. I love activists; I find it very powerful how they act and think about change. My main scholarly approach is historical; I think one of the ways to change the future is to change how we perceive what we've been doing in the past. So my current research is looking to the nineteenth and early twentieth century, into the industrialisation of cities, of foods, of people — but trying to look at those urban patterns through the eyes of a fish. How fish actually generate architecture; how the cod creates a different architecture than a sardine or a herring.

The cod has a specific physiology, he uses specific kinds of water, he eats specific kinds of foods. He needs a certain temperature, chlorophyll, water currents, and he inhabits specific ecosystems. These qualities of the cod have produced — especially since the 15th century — specific patterns of architecture: drying racks, urban settlements in Newfoundland, in Norway and all around the North Atlantic. And these architectures are very different from that generated by the sardine. The sardine is very different from the cod. It eats plankton, and then gets eaten by other larger fishes, perhaps predators like the cod. Because the way that we process a sardine is different from the way that we process a cod, this generates very different architectures.

If we start to look to the shores of the North Atlantic, we see that different fishes generate different urban patterns and buildings; the relationship is connected somehow. We can see that once we change the buildings, we also change the pressure that these buildings create upon the ecosystems. In other words, there is a back-and-forth between the marine ecosystems and the urban settlements. That’s what we’ve been doing: tracing these patterns, trying to understand how this logic works. This is a very different architectural history from that of art history books, which take a formal approach to architecture.

KOOZ What spurred you to look into this? You’re from Portugal, where cod is famously the backbone of many cultural legacies — was that it, or was there a specific prompt?

AT I think there are a few. I must say, knowing some old drying facilities as a kid, I was fascinated by these spaces and these constructions. So probably there is something to do with that. But Portuguese cod is a mythology, in the sense it's a construction of the nationalist trends of the 19th century and the fascist regime of the 20th century. To materialise this idea, as we don't have cod in the nearby waters, we would have to go five thousand kilometres away to get it from Newfoundland..

My previous research works were on the history of technology, history of media and other forms, to understand what we design as architects has to do with society and the environment. The way that we build is not to do with how we are as architects, but rather how we are as society. Having done research on, say, the way that tuberculosis transformed architecture, I think this unconventional approach to a history of practice brought me to this subject.

KOOZ What about you, Perla? You studied sustainability architecture in Aarhus, Denmark; I'm curious as to how you got here.

PGMaybe I could first say to André: you said that you're not an activist, which I respect — it's not that everybody needs to be an activist. But also, I disagree; I think you are an activist. I think architecture, in itself, is activism — or at least I’ve come to a point where I think it should be. We are constantly changing things; as architects that's what we do. We draw new proposals; we're changing landscapes, buildings and cities all the time, and there’s a huge responsibility and care that comes with that, which is very connected to activism for me.

I’m born and raised in Iceland, but I found my connection to the sea in Denmark, which is a bit funny. Most Icelandic towns are fishing villages, like pearls on a thread along the coast. Wild nature is perhaps not the first thing you think about in Denmark, but that's where I got to know the sea — by bathing in it and feeling how good it made me feel. Then I started learning about the troubles that the sea is in because of us, and it became a very easy path.

Every decision since then has been quite simple: to try to give back to the sea what it gives me. I've found plenty of work for a lifetime and more, because there's so much to be still to be figured out regarding the sea.

For me, architecture is a wide scale or spectrum, with the earth on the one end — including large scale infrastructures, resources and communities — and on the small scale, we have the human being. Perhaps in the middle of those two scales is the building. I always focused on these opposing ends of the spectrum, believing that if I mastered or took good care of those, the result would be a good and healthy building. Yet, after my bachelor's degree in architecture, I was honestly fed up with it. I nonetheless applied for an internship at my favourite office, DOGMA. I went to Brussels and it was an incredibly meaningful experience. I remember it was COVID and I was grumpy; my fisherman dad — a closed, Icelandic person — asked me what was wrong, why I wasn’t happy – wasn’t I in my dream job? It's very cliche but I burst into tears, saying that I just wanted to save the sea. He replied, ‘What are you waiting for?’

I came home and enrolled at the University of Iceland in all the ocean-related courses, through the rest of the lockdown. I had this amazing octogenarian oceanography teacher, one of the first globally to mention the term ocean acidification in a paper. In Iceland, we really like to be best at things, but nobody had told me that we had a pioneer in oceanography; his measurement series continues to be used globally. So I learned a lot, including how much we have still to discover.

KOOZ But let’s go back to this unfinished business with architecture …

PG Over COVID, I threw myself into the science side; I also got my captain's license, alongside a bunch of retired sailors. I learned that they were about to start an architectural master’s programme in Iceland, for the first time. They were to have an annual theme; the first year would be turf, but the second year was about water. Literally there was a huge photograph of the ocean, with the words Masters of Architecture at the Iceland University of Arts. I thought, who am I kidding? I’ve read enough scientific reports; I know we're in trouble, and that we need to do something. A lot of people are equipped to solve problems, but architects are extremely equipped: we're so well trained in coordinating all the different factors. We are used to bringing in so many different stakeholders; we have to deal with municipalities, with the laws of the state, as well as how people will feel in our buildings, the neighbours in the garden, the bees.

So I decided to go back to architecture with the scientific knowledge in my backpack — and it was epic, so freeing to get away again from the reports and heavy books, to simply have a giant piece of paper in front of me and a pencil. I had two brilliant, open-minded teachers. Architecture is so many different things, and Iceland is a small country; obviously we don't have a lot of architects, and our conception of the many things you can do as an architect hasn't really matured yet. Hence at architecture school, it can be a constant battle: where's the architecture? Where's your building?

KOOZ Could you briefly sketch out what your thesis — available online for full perusal! — was about, please?

PG My thesis is essentially about a goal set by the United Nations, at a meeting in Montreal in 2022. I was present on that day, together with UU and the Nordic Youth Biodiversity Network. It's equivalent to the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C goal; it has been said that we won't meet the Paris Agreement without meeting Kunming-Montréal and vice versa. The goal simply states that we will have protected at least 30% of our land and seas by 2030. The scientific community was recommending 70% protection, they were ready to negotiate down to 50% and finally, it was watered down to 30% — on the premise that the words “at least” would be there. I'm saying all this because a lot of people claim that 30% is a lot. It's really not. If we say we're going to protect 30%, I’m wondering what that means for the other 70% — that's quite a big space.

In Iceland, we have about 25% protected on land, but at sea, we are at 0.07%. We need 29.97% by 2030 — that's equivalent to about two and a half times the area of the whole island. For a lot of people, that sounds ridiculous and unreasonable, and they just close their eyes. That's the reason I did my project. I started thinking spatially: let's get a paper and a pen and start drawing for this 30%, this is the brief. We already know what we need to protect; somebody just has to draw it. My proposal isn't perfect; it's pretty well thought out, but of course it needs much bigger stakeholder negotiations and so on. Yet it is super important and powerful to bring something to the table that is tangible, to allow people to imagine what a plan can look like. We can direct our conversation from there, instead of deciding not to do something on purely financial and economic bases — simply because we aren’t equipped to imagine it.

KOOZ André, we’re being quite peripatetic in this conversation around spatial practice, bouncing between science and ecology as well as economics, land politics and geopolitical logics — things that are not always drawn into the production of buildings. You've been working on this project in some shape or another with many different stakeholders. Now that this research has crystallised into the shape of a book, can you tell us about some of these variations in agendas?

AT There are too many powerful interests set to gain from the relationship with the ocean; too many resources to be exploited, such that it's useless to do this kind of research, in a sense, because there are other things at stake. I was told thisby the head of an environmental agency to protect the oceans. Of course, it's all about money in the end, or seems to be so. I had some harsh encounters with people who really have agency in the design of funding policies and in the development of specific environment policies as well.

On the other hand, working with biologists has been extraordinary. Scientists — who tend to work in very specific departments — were really fascinated with our research, because it addressed some shared topics, but from a completely different angle. There was also some scepticism, in the sense that what we were doing was ‘not science’. I think the main issue is not knowing the answer to the question. I have some hypotheses that different fishes produce different architecture, that there is an impact on land. To answer how, I’d need someone to give me money and time — but no, that's not how science works. In scientific research, you have something to prove. If you don't know the answer, you just don't go for it — because it doesn't make sense. Their ways of working are quite different from the rather open-ended questions of the humanities. Yet scientists and biologists are usually the most curious, and they were the ones that funded the project. I received substantial support from this large European Research Council funding, which is intended for risky research, research that can fail. It’s about believing that even with the risk of not finding answers, we'll gain some fundamental knowledge that we didn’t have before.

So what is this fundamental knowledge? It's the relationship between architecture, buildings and ecosystems that are not directly related to those buildings. I know if I build on top of a valley, the water course can be destroyed by the construction: there is an immediate relation with that ecosystem. With fish, we don't see the impact. That would be the fundamental research that I'm working on now.

KOOZ So although the scientific community may not understand the structure of your research question, there is still a fundamental value seen in the research. What about any encounter from the architectural sphere?

AT My research is based out of Porto, where there is an extremely conservative vision of architecture. That's where the funding becomes fascinating, because I bring a backpack of research money, and there is a pressure to get access to it, then they start to love me. But honestly, I don't think it makes much difference, as architects don't care much about the subject. Let’s say I do an open call for a master’s course hosting twenty students — I might attract five, while other media-based courses received up to 40 applicants. So I have the feeling that architects really don't care…

PG …because they haven't been exposed to it. For me, it was the same in terms of a historically conservative approach to architecture; my Swiss-taught supervisors were probably wonderful architects, but they had absolutely no interest in going offshore.

But somehow I want to really talk about what it is that we do, and not just the struggle it can be. I'm very excited to see your book, André! There is a word in the title that I didn't know: amphibious, which I find quite beautiful. Can you tell me about how this word came to you and what it means in correlation to your work?

AT The word amphibious came through my amazing editor, Tom Weaver. We were speaking about the title and subtitle of the book. I was constantly talking about terrestrial landscapes, marine ecosystems, and this in-between space. How can we compress that in the subtitle? Amphibious totally made sense; it's neither on one side nor the other, and I've been using it more and more. Dr Alex Jordan, a scientist working in Konstanz, has said that

soon the water level will rise to a certain degree whereby all our buildings will be inhabited by fishes. In the end, perhaps we are designing for fish, because everything is going to be underwater sooner or later. And it's true, this kind of amphibious approach to things, to understand that we don't live only in the land, but also in the water.

PGIt’s a beautiful word that resonates a lot with me, and my own relationship with the sea. As human beings, we are drawn to the sea; we have this huge economic dependency on it, but it's also a dangerous place. We aren’t amphibious at all; our bodies are not made to be in the sea for very long. Yet although land is where we live, if we're going to focus on the planetary, we need to acknowledge that 70% of the Earth’s surface is water, after all.

KOOZ Certainly ‘planetary’ concerns have accelerated in the last few years; we’re talking about planetary and terrestrial issues. As you suggest, the vast proportion of current architecture is not even based itself on marine areas, but rather exclusively about land-based settlements. Going back to André’s point, the damage is not in front of us, and we don't have to confront it. Who are you both looking towards engaging and mobilising with this knowledge?

AT As Perla was saying, there is so much to learn about, but there is existing knowledge that can be used. Thinking about more people who are the interlocutors; very early in the project, we realised that although we were doing history, we needed to engage with present-day fishermen: people who actually go there and take the fish, who know what kind of water the fish likes by its colour and taste. Not by a scientific or technological device: they taste the water and know that there won't be any sea bass around. There is, in other words, embodied and embedded knowledge; this could bring us closer to indigenous relationships with the environment, with embodied knowledge, to precolonial and pre-industrialised relationships.

This rather unscientific knowledge can be extremely useful for architects in the present — probably not to get a job the day after, but for sure, to remain relevant in the critical moments. Perla, you told me ‘No, André I think you are an activist, because as an architect, you do transform’. And it's true, architects are creating images, creating horizons to transform reality. I do still believe in the transformative power of architecture, but there are very few occasions where we can actually do it. This variety of knowledge — not only the formal knowledge from universities and research communities — is extremely relevant and that we should bring to a larger arena of shared information.

PG Thank you for bringing that up. As I said earlier, there's so much undiscovered; but I hate when that’s used as an excuse, for example, for not making a marine protected area (MPA). When they say we don't know if we're damaging the sea, that's not true. We know plenty; scientists have been shouting it for decades. And then there is this other body of knowledge, and that's the embodied knowledge that André is talking about: the fishermen that go out and dip their fingers in the sea and know what species they will find — also from the surface of the sea and what they read in their environment. We aren't taught this at university; that is a problem, especially for a field like architecture, which does reach out into the real world.

During my studies, I don’t think I ever designed buildings on paper — but I did make two. These were buildings that we actually built, together with my peers. The way that I like to learn is usually by doing, and by doing with my body; hence how I got to know the sea, through bathing in it. We all have some embodied knowledge in us, but that knowledge is everywhere around us as well, which is especially important for architects. When I look back it seems that architects have always been drawing a future — and not one where they wanted to destroy us. That was never the point when they were doing their grand plans. But I don't see that anymore, the idea of architects bringing utopian visions in that larger sense. I think utopia is a tool that is greatly underused. We need to imagine the things that don't exist, in order to change what does exist. If we just keep providing the service of drawing buildings that people need or might not need, we're not going to change anything.

KOOZ You are reminding me of various speculative capital-driven projects that use ecological ideas as their brand or ethos — they often fail when the funding doesn’t play out. As you say, architecture is at the service of relatively short-term capital, rather than social or even planetary concerns.

PG I think that's what we can change — at least that’s what I was trying to do in my project, and what I embraced with André and his team in Ísafjörður: not to be at the service of capital. There are so many architects already doing that, but we need some for the sea, for all its creatures, for the cod. The cod also has needs; we are stepping on those needs when we warm the sea so that the fish have to move, or when we are scraping the sea floor so the corals — essentially buildings, and coral reefs are cities — are destroyed. We have streams of refugee fish. Those fish are not the clients of any architect, but they are a client of a huge lobby, in a sense. I'm not drawing for capital. (Or perhaps in a sense, I am. The fish don't care if we make an MPA or not. We are the ones who want to catch some fish. The zone next to the MPA is always the most prosperous, where you get the most fish; it's called spillover effect.) Of course, it's a huge luxury to be able to put something other than capital as your client, but there are grants and there is funding; you can choose to take that path.

I have a question for André, the title of your book is Architecture Follows Fish; for me, that's an equivalent to the idea that people follow fish as well. I remember in Ísafjörður, we were looking at how the architecture of the vessel has been growing larger, allowing fishermen to go further out. So if architecture follows fish — which, essentially, is people following fish — further out to sea, then we become responsible for taking care of that area. But I was just wondering, how can we do that without,in a way, being colonisers? Maybe we already are, when we put our boat out there. Is it a matter of tidying up after oneself? We’re not very good at being a part of the marine environment precisely because we are not amphibious. We can't stay below, we can only look at it from above. So how is that for you André; is there a limit to where the architect can reach?

AT Well, when there are no more fish, there are no more buildings in coastal regions; everything collapses, people go abroad. You can see these ruins all over Iceland; spectacular, sublime ruins and abandoned places because there were no more fish. Usually the strategy is, as you said, more money, more investments, and we go further and further out. The classic Moby Dick addresses that example in Nantucket and New Bedford; the American whaling industry in the 19th century simply started as a coastal activity, and then it went further and further. But if you put in more money, you need more whales to recover what you invested. So the pressure grows and grows, until at some point it simply collapses and vanishes. I'm giving an economic explanation to the phenomena.

To be a bit more positive: if caught by a bottom trawler, or by a small fisherman with a little boat, the same fish has an extremely different value, and you can make different things out of it. So how should we transform fisheries? I think it comes from raising more value from the fish that we take. We saw, in Ísafjörður, how the war industry is using cod skin to make implants and grafts for people, to use in plastic surgery procedures treating burns. The same cod gives more profit, with less pressure. I think there might be a balance somewhere.

Another problem that I don't address much in my research, but which I'm always thinking about, is that from the 1980s onwards, aquaculture and fish farming entered the game of markets. This really changed the relationship for humans who eat fish, in terms of how we satisfy our demand for animal protein. But to come back to a possible relationship between the collapse of the fisheries and the collapse of the Arctic, for example, I think it's about being smarter in using the resources that we have and don't have at our disposal. Often, extracting more value doesn’t necessarily mean exerting more pressure. It’s about being clever in a sense of being generous and acknowledging the value of those resources, acknowledging the privilege that we have.

KOOZ That privilege is something to which your book and your research pays tribute. Do you think it’s more useful for scientists to help reinforce their claims to policy makers, or is it more geared towards architectural and spatial thinkers?

AT I think it could be both. One alternative title that I had for the book was “The History of Destruction,” which the publisher did not like too much…

PG Maybe it would be catchy… but perhaps we need to nourish hope?

AT I agree that we need hope; also because it's possible, not impossible. We can turn things around, but we need to shift some gears in the way that we think. I hope my book contributes to these shifting gears so people can think differently about the way that we build. But when I think about the history of destruction, the paradox is that we constantly see hope failing. In Norway, there was hope in the 1930s decisions that crushed the ecosystems of the 1950s and 1960s. That idea of development was forged in a certain moment, and it was seen as extremely positive, extremely optimistic; twenty years later, it was seen as a disaster in terms of ecology.

I also have a secret wish, because I'm an architect; I can't escape it anymore. I have a desire that architects would see themselves as people who understand the environment in which they are operating and can contribute to its transformation — not by ‘adding’ value, but somehow unlocking and sharing value. It’s probably too optimistic as a vision of the architect as a professional, but that’s the hope.

KOOZ If ecology and planetary issues are one aspect in which architectural discourse has amplified — and rightly so — the term ‘care’ is another one that has grown louder, right?

PG I hope so, yes. That’s at least the reason I was laughing with my teachers, when they would ask me where the building was. I told them, we don't need more buildings; we need to take care of the ones that we have. Actually, what I'm proudest of in my thesis project — in my proposal of marine protected areas — is the final chapter on designated fishing grounds. If I would have stayed true to the activist, of course I would ban bottom net trawling altogether. Bottom net trawling is devastation for the sea floor; I don't like to use war metaphors, but you're just scraping up whole cities, with living creatures losing their homes. I keep insisting that coral is a building, its the home of someone, which means that a coral reef is a city. We allow fishing methods that just scrape this away, its basically bulldozers. But now that we're going to protect areas, I was proposing to turn it around; instead of protecting 30%, why aren't we “allowing” only 10% to be open for fishing? In Iceland the fisheries lobby is freaking out about 30%, but they’re only trawling about 10% of the EEZ.

At the workshop with André, we were having the cod draw the lines for us — almost trying to synthesise a floor plan and a section — around the space that the cod inhabits, dependent on salinity and temperature. Then we took those lines into different depths, like contours in a landscape. We ended up with a sort of blob in which the cod likes to live. But for the designated fishing grounds I did the opposite; I used the AIS / GPS data of the ships and traced where they had been trawling. Again, it was basically tracing the shapes, essentially drawn by the fishermen themselves, appearing like tribal tattoos on the ground plan.Of course, we must eventually ban bottom-net trawling, but I'm also aware that we can’t do that overnight. So let's designate the areas where they already are fishing; there's nothing there to protect. They’ve already destroyed the sea floor there; let’s demarcate those zones. I guess that is one kind of care, a care for the fishermen, that also needs to be there. A kind of care that architects are trained to develop.

There has been a problem in Iceland with defining the shapes of the protected areas and architects could discernibly be of use. These spaces seem to either become rectangles, or else a polygon with 67 coordinates. It doesn’t make any sense, especially as the sea is also moving. Or a corridor so small the captain can’t manoeuvre their boat along it. Sometimes there is no need to be so precise, we can generalise quite a lot — after all, there's no harm done by protecting too much.

KOOZ That is indeed what you do in the last part of your thesis — generating these volumes that you propose as fishing areas, right?

PG Yes, that’s right. You mentioned fish farming, which is indeed (excuse my language) fucking up the balance or equilibrium that we're trying to maintain, and it's developing way too fast. Actually, a nice thing just happened in Iceland: fish farms are now classified as a form of construction, so you will need a building permit. This is quite a new idea here: every time somebody applies to run a fish farm, they must apply for a building permit, which means they must deliver ground plans and sections. Architects within the building permit department don't know how to read nautical charts and vice versa. This exchange and process is happening now, so architects will actually have to step into the territory of the sea.

KOOZ André, you just presented your book in New York; how do you think it was received by the audience there?

AT This was an event put together by Carson Chan at the Museum of Modern Art, which was the key moment. He organised it in a brilliant way, so that I realised that there are more people addressing the topic of ocean architecture. Perhaps they don't call it that, but still, I met people from transportation to salmon leathers to indigenous communities to digital mapping. It was very refreshing to understand other connections: we don't need to be trapped within the concerns of fish, we can definitely relate differently with the ocean and also with lands; even, to come back to Perla’s comment, understanding our amphibious condition.

PG I hope it was okay to embrace a bit of “ocean as a method” for this talk. It was and has been the main methodology in life since my thesis, and it comprises recognising that life isn't linear; there are flows and ebbs, tides and currents. Sometimes you’re in a work mode, and sometimes you’re not, there are no straight lines.

KOOZ I think both André and I would agree with that method. Let’s keep it as a mantra for now. Thank you both so much.

Bios

Sigrún Perla Gísladóttir is an interdisciplinary architect, working between art and activism – in, on, by, with, and for the ocean. She studied at Aarhus School of Architecture, interned at Dogma in Brussels, and holds a postgraduate diploma in Environment- and Natural Resources with an emphasis on oceanography. Perla graduated from the Iceland University of the Arts with a thesis proposal titled a moving body of water ~ Architectures of Marine Protected Areas around Iceland.

André Tavares is an architect, founding director of Dafne Editora, and a researcher in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto where he leads the project ‘Fishing Architecture’ funded by the European Research Council. He was chief co-curator of the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, The Form of Form, and is the author of the books The Anatomy of the Architectural Book and Architecture Follows Fish.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.