Draft:Lucy Bullivant

Lucy Bullivant Hon FRIBA is a curatorial director, place strategist and author based in London, noted for her focus over the last 25 years on the adaptive capacities of cities explored through iterative multidisciplinary design.

Early life and education

Bullivant was born in St Pancras, London, to architect parents, Dargan and Patricia Bullivant. She trained at the Architectural Association and UCL, and was educated at Leeds University (BA Hons, History of Art and English), the Royal College of Art (MARCA, Cultural History) and London Metropolitan University (PhD by Prior Output, Adaptive Planning). In 2010 Bullivant was elected an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects for her services to sustainable architectural culture. She is a chair of the Lambeth Design Review Panel (2019-), a member of Enfield Council's Design Review Panel an Expert - Specialist (Design Council) and a Trustee, Temple Bar London, the educational trust.

Career

Over the last 25 years Bullivant has collaborated with organisations and firms in the cultural industries, further education and local government, on culture-led regeneration projects involving participatory placemaking and social value assessments. Her early roles include Heinz Curator of Architectural Programmes at the Royal Academy of Arts, and curator/director of a number of touring art and design exhibitions for bodies including DAI, established by writer, advisor and event producer John Thackara, which took her to Japan to deliver projects at AXIS Center, Tokyo and Hankyu department store, Oaska, and the Royal College of Art. She regularly gives keynotes globally. Her photograph, Rainbow balloon entrance display, was selected for the Historic England Archive as part of the Picturing Lockdown Collection created during April and May 2020 in response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

She has most recently co-curated with award-winning architect Alex Furunes Dugnad Days, a participatory creative reuse project in Sletteløkka, Oslo, showcased in the Oslo Architecture Triennale, 2019, Frontiera Livre, a community initiative with migrant workers and São Paulo Metro for the city’s Biennale of Architecture, 2017, and WeMake ReMake, a project about community identity with fashion industry workers and students for the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, 2016. During lockdown she co-created Urban Manifesto, a new webinar series dedicated to liveable urbanism with architect Prathima Manohar, founder of the think-do-tank The Urban Vision.

Major exhibitions

'Retrofit 23: Towards Deep Retrofitting of Homes at Scale', curated for the Building Centre, London (2023) presented the case for full-scale transition in the UK towards deep retrofit as a top priority for achieving net zero, to enable citizens to reap the social, economic and environment benefits. In 2001 Bullivant curated 'Space Invaders', an exhibition demonstrating the vitality of a new wave of British innovators in UK architecture, curated with Pedro Gadanho, which opened at Experimentadesign, the Lisbon design festival, a project for the British Council which toured globally for 3 years. "‘Architecture as a creative profession has been revolutionised by an increasing engagement with local and urban global culture and its tactics are more and more those that work in the visual arts, graphic design, advertising and art direction", she said at the launch.

Her exhibition, 'The near and the far, fixed and in flux', was the UK pavilion at the 1996 Milan Triennale, supported by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office of the UK government, and she co-curated with Vitra Design Museum the exhibition Kid size: the material world of childhood, a major exploration of this topic in and beyond the Western world, which toured for 8 years globally, and described as "a blockbuster of this genre" by Abigail A. Van Slyck in her review for the Winterthur Portfolio.

Investigative journalism and competition judging

Bullivant has evaluated architecture, urban design and planning schemes for over 25 years through her extensive work as a judge of international competitions including AJ Architecture Awards, ArchMarathon and LEAF; as an author of building studies for Architects’ Journal and Architecture Today, and features for Architectural Review, Volume, Archis, Icon, Domus, The Plan, a+u, Architectural Record and Indesign, The Guardian and The Financial Times. She has advocated for alternative housebuilding models in her lectures and in published interviews.

Books published

Masterplanning Futures

Her books include Masterplanning Futures, on adaptive planning, which won Book of the Year, Urban Design Group Awards in 2014 (Routledge, 2012; 2^ndedition, 2021)."Set against the wider horizon appearing in the wake of the global economic crisis, this book presents a thoroughly researched argument for a reclaimed approach to masterplanning. A lively, discursive introduction charts how masterplans can no longer be singular, top-down prescriptions but must offer a collective vision and operate as a framework that can be adapted over time", wrote Juliet Bidgood in her review for Urban Design.

4D Hyperlocal: A Cultural Toolkit for the Open Source City (guest editor, AD/Wiley, 2017) is "a thought-provoking manifesto on the potential of digital technologies through essays on the practices of the minimum viable Utopia, digital neighbourhoods and the image of a data city. While it would have been tempting to marvel at the bright, shiny future, this is however a manifesto grounded in practicality with plenty of real-world examples amid all the future-gazing. Essential reading for those up for the challenge of exploiting data to reshape our environment", wrote Richard McPartland.

4D series and Responsive Environments

4D Hyperlocal is part of a series of works Bullivant began in the 1990s evaluating the social role of interactive architecture: Responsive Environments: architecture, art and design (V&A Contemporary, 2006); 4dsocial: Interactive Design Environments (guest editor, AD/Wiley, 2007), and 4dspace: Interactive Architecture (AD/Wiley, 2005) and accompanying conferences at Tate Modern, the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Architectural Associations, London.

Recoded City: Co-creating urban futures

Recoded City: Co-creating urban futures, on participatory placemaking, co-authored with Thomas Ermacora (Routledge, 2015) "champions a broad, diversified, holistic approach to urban design which simultaneously commits to social responsibility and local engagement. The needs and ambitions of communities and stakeholder groups are the focal point of Ermacora and Bullivant’s vision and, stepping outside the studio and workshop, Recoded City also shares inventive ways in which urban realm projects have attracted and encouraged social activities and participation, or have collaborated with community activists".

Anglo Files and New Arcadians

Bullivant charted the trajectories of an emerging generation of flexibly modernist and post-modernist architects in two books, Anglo Files: UK architecture's rising generation (Thames & Hudson, 2005), and New Arcadians: emerging UK architects (Merrell, 2012) which, according to Tony Minichiello, in his review for Domus, "provides plenty of evidence that the most progressive architecture is produces in periods of economic and political crisis". "They have been brought up to admire the great masters of modernism, but as Lucy Bullivant shows in New Arcadians: Emerging UK Architects, writes Jonathan Rée in Prospect magazine. "They realise that the world has changed. They cannot expect lavish budgets, or vast sites, or a free hand to erect lasting monuments to extra-large egos". "What is exemplary in Bullivant's book", wrote Murray Fraser in his review of Anglo Files in Architects' Journal, "is the number of non-British architects included, with UK residency given equal status to that of nationality. Thus we find a Spaniard and an Iranian running Foreign Office Architects; David Adjaye, a Tanzania-born Ghanian, albeit Londoner by adoption, and many more".

Urbanista.org

In 2013 she founded Urbanista.org, her webzine for liveable urbanism, producing a number of multi-themed issues, including Sustainable Urbanism - New Directions, with the University of Qatar.