We Were Never Neutral: Design-through-making as Situated Architectural Inquiry

You are cordially invited to attend the research seminar by Christo Meyer:

Date: 6 Oct 2025
Time: 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT421

We Were Never Neutral: Design-through-making as Situated Architectural Inquiry

Abstract:

Architecture has never been neutral.  The persistent claim to objectivity and universality has obscured the material, cultural, and political entanglements that shape our built environments.  This seminar advances a practice-based theory of design-through-making as a critical and situated mode of architectural inquiry.  Drawing on his transnational experience across South Africa, the UK, Thailand, and Singapore, Christo Meyer positions making not as the execution of known solutions, but as a generative epistemology:  a way of thinking with materials, communities, and contested contexts.

Design-through-making, in this framing, becomes a research methodology that is embodied, relational, and performative, resisting abstraction and embracing contingency.  This ethos extends into pedagogy and leadership, where the design studio is treated as a laboratory of shared inquiry and the university as a platform for reflexive worldmaking.

The seminar outlines a forward-looking research agenda that includes hybrid material cultures, embedded live projects across Southeast Asia, and multimodal modes of publication that make visible the processes, failures, and social dimensions of design. Through this work, Meyer proposes an expanded model of architectural practice;  one grounded in collaboration, situated knowledge, and critical care.

Against the paradigm of detached problem solving, this talk reframes architecture as a contextual, speculative, and materially engaged form of knowledge production, and calls for a discipline that can think, make, and act otherwise in an increasingly entangled world.

Christo Meyer ARB RIBA is a British-South African registered architect, educator, and founder of CHRISTO MEYER WORKS, a creative practice at the intersection of architecture, design, research and academia.  His academic affiliation includes teaching and supervision within NUS DOA, where he contributes to the BA Arch and M Arch programmes.  Christo’s academic and professional background spans institutions such as The Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), the University of Greenwich, the University of Brighton, University of Central Lancashire, and INDA at Chulalongkorn University, where he previously served as Assistant Director for Academics and Fourth-Year Coordinator.  His work is grounded in design-through-making, with a research focus on exploratory and experimental models/devices/drawings, spatial narratives, and the intersection of cultural memory and material construction.  Christo’s work has been exhibited, published, and presented internationally, and he has been invited to contribute to symposia, editorial platforms, and design juries across Southeast Asia and beyond.