About Sam McElhinney
Staff
Architect & Academic
British
Sam McElhinney
Sam leads Theory teaching in the Interactive Architecture Lab and is also an accomplished architect and installation artist. Sam founded MUD Architecture in September 2012 as a vehicle to bring together strands of research, teaching and practice. MUD has ongoing private housing projects including a self-build refurbishment of a historic building in Canterbury. Sam currently runs the MA Architecture and BA Interior Architecture & Design courses at the Canterbury School of Architecture. He is a former member of the ‘Space Group’ at UCL and his ongoing research is focussed on developing real- time and motive spatial analytic models.
From 2005 to 2012 Sam was a key member of Surface Architects. During this time Surface twice came third in BD's Young Architect of the Year Award. Sam was Project Architect and Design Lead for Surface's highest profile built project, a series of Wayfinding Structures in the 2012 Olympic Park in Stratford, East London. After leaving Surface he acted as a Design Manager at Jason Bruges Studio, running the design, construction and commissioning of the prestigious WWF Experience Installation.
Born in Bath, South West England, Sam studied architecture at Cambridge University and the Bartlett, University College London. On graduation from UCL he won the Ambrose Poynter Prize for his thesis 'Labyrinths, Mazes and the Spaces Inbetween'. He has expansive theoretical and exhibit based research into adaptive maze and labyrinth spaces. In 2010 he won the prestigious ‘Best Paper’ at the European Meeting of Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna. In the past he has lectured at numerous institutions including Porto Architecture Faculty, Cambridge University and the MAXXI in Rome.
WEBSITE: http://www.mudarchitecture.com/
EMAIL: sam@mudarchitecture.com
Featured Lab Project
Featured Lab Project
Furl: Soft Pneumatic Pavilion
The domain of soft robotics is forming as a new frontier of kinetic designing. Not only creating many new possibilities for robotics but also in architecture. Challenging conventional design thinking ...