Rachel Armstrong

Professor of Experimental Architecture, University of Newcastle

Rachel Armstrong is Professor of Experimental Architecture at the Department of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, University of Newcastle. She was coordinator for the Living Architecture Horizon 2020 FET open project, is coordinator for the ALICE Innovation Award, winner of the English Women’s Awards, North, for Services to Science and Technology, 2019, profiled in the RIBA Journal, 2018, a Rising Waters II Fellow with the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation (April-May 2016), Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society (2016), TWOTY futurist 2015, and a 2010 Senior TED Fellow.

Rachel investigates a new approach to building materials called ‘living architecture,’ which suggests it is possible for our buildings to share some of the properties of living systems. Collaboratively working across disciplines, she builds and develops prototypes that couple the computational properties of the natural world with matter at far from equilibrium. She calls the synthesis that occurs between these systems and their inhabitants “living” architecture. Rachel is widely published in both academic and popular press.