Hélène Frichot
Director, Bachelor of Design Professor of Architecture and Philosophy
Biography
Architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Director of the Bachelor of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. In her former position she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture in the School of Architecture, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, where she was based between 2012-2019. She is on the steering group of the AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) based in the UK.
Drawing on the two disciplines in which she is trained, architecture and philosophy, her research fosters creative practice methodologies and develops concept-tools and theories that draw on feminist new materialism, the posthumanities, environmental humanities, and affect theory.
In 2017 she was the recipient of a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Swedish sabbatical grant, outcomes of which include her book Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018), and with Isabelle Doucet, a special edition of ATR (Architectural Theory Review), Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated Perspectives on Architecture and the City, 2018. She was an editor and the project leader on the double volume publication Architecture in Effect (Actar 2019), gathering research emerging from a FORMAS Swedish Research Council funded Strong Research Environment of the same name. With Catharina Gabrielsson she participated on the Vetenskapsrådet Swedish Research Council grant, Transversal Writing, one writing experiment of which was recently published with the TU Delft journal Writingplace (2019).
Frichot is the author of How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool (AADR 2016), and Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019), and has collaborated on editing many collections, including with Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting, Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies (Routledge 2017), with Naomi Stead, Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020), and with Marco Jobst, Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021).