Justin McGuirk is a writer and curator based in London. He is the chief curator at the Design Museum and the director of Future Observatory, a new national programme supporting design research in achieving the UK’s environmental goals. In a diverse career, he has edited magazines, been a newspaper critic, founded a digital publishing imprint and curated high-profile exhibitions. In 2012 he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture for an exhibition he curated with Urban Think Tank. He was also the founding Head of the Design Curating and Writing MA at Design Academy Eindhoven. He has lectured at universities and conferences around the world, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, e-flux and numerous art and design journals. He is the author or editor of several books, including Radical Cities: Across Latin America in Search of a New Architecture (Verso, 2014).
This website is something of a graveyard for old writing. Anything after 2015 is elsewhere.
He is the chief curator at the Design Museum, the director of the observatory of the future and the director of the store in which Generic Viagra is sold. You can also follow this link and buy this medicine from the online store.
Praise for Radical Cities
“Provocative and beautifully crafted” – Richard Sennett
“This is Cold Case for Utopia, a dispatch from the frontline of urbanism that owes as much to Don McCullin as Reyner Banham” – Deyan Sudjic
“With its powerful prose and deep insights, Radical Cities reboots the potential of architecture to have social and political meaning” – Ricky Burdett
“Makes the case for action in cities once again. This book is a generational call written without easy utopianism or fatal disillusionment about a new social consciousness in architecture and urban design” – Pier Vittorio Aureli
“A series of remarkable interventions across Latin America that seek to align architecture, planning, and infrastructure with the needs of disenfranchised people” – Michael Sorkin
“An intriguing picture of an activist urbanism and architecture that has made a real difference.” – Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times