Dr Victoria Watson
I am a qualified Architect with a specialist degree in the History of Modern Architecture and a PhD in Architecture. I studied at the Bartlett School UCL and in the Department of Architecture at the Polytechnic of Central London.
Currently I am a Senior Lecturer here at the University of Westminster and I direct my own practice: Doctor Watson Architects that conducts architectural research encompassing the invention of architectonic models and the publication of academic and scholarly papers and articles. In 2010 I won a Rome scholarship and in 2011 my book, Utopian Adventure: the Corviale Void was published. From 2016 to 2019 I have worked on a trilogy of papers about Miesian Space and Capitalist Development and am just completing a parallel trilogy about the use of the garden metaphor to conceptualise the spatiality of modern art museums.
My research combines architectural design with academic writing for journals and books. I devise and make architectonic models that are integral to my thought process, they explore space, materiality and colour but most importantly, by making them, I am able to clarify organisational and structural aspects of my research.
My research is about the dialectic of imagination and reality. I am especially interested in the phenomenon of utopian imagining in architecture and how that impacts upon the production of actual places in city, town and countryside.
I was intrigued by remarks made by Rosalind Krauss and Robin Evans that connected Mies van der Rohe's buildings to ideas about painting and installation art. My research took this thinking much further and discovered the utopia of mobility that underlies the Miesian concept of space and establishes the continuity between his pre and post emigration work.
Another utopia I am fascinated by is the modern art museum. I have been studying Tate Modern and the notion of the art museum as a garden, which was an important consideration in awarding the commission to Herzog and de Meuron. My investigation links this 'gardenisation' of the art space in London to H&dMs more recent Museum of the Twentieth Century, which extends the New National Gallery on Berlin's culture forum.
I am currently starting a new project that will explore utopia and reality through a study of the new towns of Peterlee and Stevenage