Aleks Catina profile

Aleks Catina

Senior Lecturer

Lecturer

Architectural design and methods

Department of Architecture & Visual Arts , School of Architecture Computing and Engineering

Aleks Catina is a Senior Lecturer and Year 1 Coordinator for BSc Architecture at the University of East London. He studied architecture at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 2006, and has been teaching in higher education since 2008. He teaches, writes and researches at the intersection of architectural history and theory, pedagogy and critical practice, and is committed to widening access and to empowering students to bring their own perspectives and lived experience to the architectural profession.

Qualifications

  • Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy (SFHEA)
  • MA RCA
  • MA Architecture H&T
  • BA (Hons) Architecture
  • Senior Fellow of Higher Education Academy (SFHEA)
  • RIBA II
  • Pg Dip Learning & Teaching in HE

Areas Of Interest

  • Monuments, memory and provincialised critique
  • Post-colonial and post-communist visual culture
  • Dialogical pedagogy and the design studio as a space of reflective practice
  • Decolonising curriculum in architectural education
  • Hybrid writing at the intersection of architecture, criticism and theory
  • Communicative action and power in architectural history and theory
     
Aleks Catina profile

OVERVIEW

Aleks leads the Year 1 Architecture course at UEL, guiding students through the foundational stages of their architectural education via a research-led approach and a strong emphasis on professionalisation. Alongside the studio, he teaches history and theory across different levels of the Architecture and Interior Design courses, with a focus on opening the curriculum to multiple voices and perspectives, drawing on non-Western traditions and postcolonial histories of space and place.

The Year 1 provision is designed around a dialogical model of studio teaching. Iterative processes of inquiry, reflection and making enable students to relate their individual experience to the discourses shaping the architectural profession. Through designing, making and representation, the course encourages students to bridge the gap between the architectural image and the lived experience of the world they are being equipped to work in.
Central to this approach is a belief that a genuinely multi-voiced studio, one that draws on the full range of backgrounds, perspectives and histories that students carry with them, is both a richer learning environment and a more honest preparation for the challenges of contemporary architectural practice.

CURRENT RESEARCH

Research and impact

Aleks’ doctoral project examines architecture through the production and representation of monuments in contemporary art from peripheral contexts in the twenty-first century. Moving across post-colonial and post-communist geographies—from Sub-Saharan Africa to Eastern Europe—the project asks what insights these situated critiques offer for a more heteroglot and plural understanding of critical architecture.

In his published work on pedagogy, Aleks addresses the opportunities offered by a decolonised curriculum for the advancement of reflective teaching practice. He pursues a dialogical approach that widens the spectrum of voices in discussions of equity and advocacy in architecture, including those of his students. His recent book, The Pillars of Uncertainty, is a hybrid of research, criticism and fiction that grew directly out of this work. It extends his interest in how architectural discourse is shaped and controlled by asking who gets to write about architecture, and how. 

Most recent research

PUBLICATIONS

Authored Book(s)

Book Chapter(s)

Journal Articles

  • Aleks Catina, Review: 'Superstudio Migrazioni' (exhibition), ARQ, July 2021.
  • Aleks Catina, 'Letter to a Young Architect', Architecture Review, September 2020, n,73-4.
  • Aleks Catina, 'Dialogue and studio space: the architectural design studio as the setting for continuous reflection', Journal of Applied Learning and Teaching, Vol. 3, No.1, Singapore, 2020.
  • Aleks Catina, 'Stages of Dialogue: the role of reflective teaching and learning in the architecture design studio', Investigations in University Teaching and Learning (2017).
  • Aleks Catina, 'The Failings of a Fleet of Fools: Encountering the interiors of disused power stations'. Idea Journal, 13(1), 2013, p.130-141.

Conferences and Talks

Conference papers

  • 'The Dubious High Street: Images between gentrification and social value'; 16th Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) Conference: Architecture and Collective Life, Dundee, November 2019.
  • 'Stages of Dialogue; Widening access through design teaching'; London Metropolitan Learning and Teaching Conference; London, 2019.
  • Panel chair The Commons and Public Space, at AHRA conference, Dundee, 2019.
  • Adeyemi Akande and Aleks Catina, ‘Replacement and the Elsewhere Monument: The White Cube Lusanga at the Giardini della Biennale,’ (conference paper) International Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) Conference: Body Matters, Norwich, November 2024. 

 

Talks

  • AAD Sessions: 'Forms of Resistance', 25th May 2022.
  • 'Provincializing Irony, decolonising architectural meaning-making' (talk), Learning and Teaching Conference 2021, London Metropolitan University.

Visit the UEL research repository to view a full list of publications.

MODULES

  • First Year design studio
  • History and Theory, Year 1 and 2

Publications

Browse past publications by year.

Full publications list

Visit the research repository to view a full list of publications

Research repository

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Teaching