Research

  • Ron Herron: Archigram and After
  • GRANTEE
    Simon Herron & Mark Morris
    GRANT YEAR
    2016

Ron Herron, Death Valley, 1970, London. Courtesy of Simon Herron.

When Ron Herron died twenty years ago, his son collected the contents of his father's office for safekeeping. Housed in dozens of boxes and flat-file cabinets, this time capsule contains original drawings and mixed-media collage works of many well-known Archigram projects, as well documentation of Herron’s own practice, lecture notes, professional correspondence, image source material, and ephemera from the early 1960s to mid-1990s. Offering a fascinating view of the profession on the eve of digital revolution, these never-before-organized works combine drawing, collage, photography, and xerography. This project examines the collection as a whole, including a scholarly cross-section of work intended to form the basis of a future book, a definitive monograph.

Simon Herron is the academic leader in architectural technology at the University of Greenwich and, with Susanne Isa, a postgraduate design studio tutor to Diploma Unit 16. He trained at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London and the Städelschule Frankfurt. Previously, he was a senior college teaching fellow at the Bartlett UCL and has also taught at University of Westminster, SCI-Arc in Los Angeles, and at the Architectural Association. He has lectured publically at the Prague Society of Architects (1990), the Arnofini Gallery in Bristol (1991), the Moscow School of Architecture (1992), the Städelschule Frankfurt (1995), Urban Flash Taipei (1999), SCI-Arc (2004), the Future Cities Program at the Barbican Centre London (2006), and Wonder Acres, Chicago Institute of Arts (2009). He worked for Michael Hopkins Architects before joining Ron Herron Associates, where he became a partner in 1989.

Mark Morris teaches architectural theory, history, and design at Cornell University. A former winner of the AIA Henry Adams Medal and the RIBA Research Trust Award, Morris studied architecture at the Ohio State University and received his PhD from the University of London. He has previously taught at the Architectural Association, Bartlett (UCL), the Ohio State University, and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Morris's essays have been featured in Frieze, Cabinet, Critical Quarterly, the Cornell Journal of Architecture, AD, and Domus. He is author of Models: Architecture and the Miniature (Wiley, 2006) and Automatic Architecture: Designs from the Fourth Dimension (College of Architecture, University of North Carolina, 2006). His research focuses on architectural drawings, models, scale, and questions of representation. He has served as coordinator of post-professional degree programs and director of graduate studies at Cornell, as well as a research fellow at the Tate Modern.