Justin McGuirk is a writer and curator based in London. He is the director of Future Observatory, the national design research programme for the green transition, established by the Design Museum in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He is also the former chief curator of the Design Museum, where he oversaw the exhibitions programme for eight years and curated or co-curated numerous exhibitions, including Fear and Love (2016), California: Designing Freedom (2017), Charlotte Perriand: The Modern Life (2021) and Waste Age (2021). In a diverse career, he has edited magazines, been a newspaper critic (the Guardian), founded a digital publishing imprint (Strelka Press) and curated critically acclaimed 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.
Praise for Radical Cities
“Provocative and beautifully crafted” – Richard Sennett
“A series of remarkable interventions across Latin America that seek to align architecture, planning, and infrastructure with the needs of disenfranchised people” – Michael Sorkin
“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
“An intriguing picture of an activist urbanism and architecture that has made a real difference.” – Edwin Heathcote, Financial Times