Dr Claude Dutson
- Tutor (Research)
- Digital Direction MA
Claude is an interdisciplinary practitioner and researcher whose work investigates architecture, power and technology through a critical spatial practice of architectural drawing, model-making and virtual reality.
Claude trained in Architecture at the University of East London (2005) and the Royal College of Art (2008), completing a PhD (RCA) by practice in Architecture in 2016. She has a background in Media Studies, working in new media consultancy at the height of the dotcom boom – and subsequent bust – in the 1990s.
Her research focus is the architecture of Silicon Valley, a historical investigation into evolution of the campuses of Apple, Facebook and Google, the spatialisation of their management cultures and what the architecture says about corporate power, and the ethical, socio-political and environmental consequences of the technical imaginary of these companies. She explores these through architectural drawing, 3D models and Virtual Reality recreations of the tech company campuses. Using only Publicly Available Information (PAI) drawn from the internet, she inverts the surveillant technologies of three tech companies to investigate the publicly inaccessible architectures of power. She is writing a book Proprietary Polis: Architecture and Silicon Valley (forthcoming).
Claude’s other research includes queer spaces, queer bodies, and spaces of alterity (VR). She leads the RCA research cluster Virtual Realities and Alterities to investigate immersive media from a standpoint of alterity: sexuality, race, gender, nationality, class.
Claude is an experienced design studio tutor; she ran the Object Mediated Interactions (OMI) platform on MA Design Products from (2018–23), and has been a specialism lead for the Experimental Design Pathway (XD) on the MA Information Experience Design. She also teaches on the MArch Cinematic and Videogame Architecture, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and previously taught BA and MA Architecture (RIBA parts I and II) at the Canterbury School of Architecture, UCA.
Claude’s work is published in Disegno #35 (2023), Architecture and Collective Life (Routledge, 2021), Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies Economies Technologies (Routledge, 2018), Industries of Architecture (Routledge, 2016), and she co-edited a special issue of Architecture and Culture, with Igea Troiani:‘Space to Learn/Think/Work: The Contested Architectures of Higher Education’ (2021). She regularly lectures on architecture and design courses in the UK and Europe, including School of Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA), and Chelsea College of Art. She is an experienced public speaker participating in public talks and panels including at London Design Week, Design Museum, V&A Museum, IKON gallery, and at industry events.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Expertise
Gallery
More information
Practice
Claude’s practice is grounded in the architectural techniques of physical model-making, digital prototyping and drawing, and also brings in the interdisciplinary practices of art practice, video, performance and virtual reality.
Claude has trained in performance techniques and theatrical methods such as ‘actioning’, verbatim theatre, Augusto Boal’s forum theatre and script-writing for performance.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Publications
Dutson, C., Proprietary Polis: Architecture and Silicon Valley, (forthcoming book)
Dutson, C., ‘Seeing Through the Walls of Silicon Valley,’ Disegno #35: The Journal of Design, (London: Arvinius + Orfeus Publishing, 2023)
Dutson, C. & Holliss, F., ‘Open City / Closed City,’ in Housing and the City, Katharina Borsi (ed), (London: Routledge 2022)
Dutson, C., ‘The Proprietary Polis,’ in Architecture and Collective Life, Lorens Holm, Penny Lewis, Sandra Costa Santos (eds) (London: Routledge 2021)
Dutson, C., Ozmin, J., Runting, H., ‘Oh BB BB! A collective review of Sibling and Adam Nathaniel Furman’s Boudoir Babylon,’ Inflection Journal of the Melbourne School of Design, Vol 08, (2021)
Dutson, C & Troiani, I, ‘The Neoliberal University as a Space to Learn/Think/Work in Higher Education,’ Architecture & Culture: The Neoliberal University, Volume 9, Issue 1, (Taylor and Francis, 2021)
Dutson, C., ‘The Entreprenuerial Self’, in Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies Economies Technologies, Hélène Frichot, Catharina Gabrielsson and Helen Runting (eds) (Routledge, 2018)
Dutson, C., ‘Private Passions in the Silicon Valley’ in E.R.O.S. Journal: The Interior, Sami Jalili (ed.) (E.R.O.S. Press: November 2015)
Dutson, C., ‘Performativity and Paranoia: or How to Do the ‘Internet of Things’ with Words’, in Industries of Architecture, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff, Nick Beech (eds), (Routledge Critiques Series, 2015)
Dutson, C., Light Volumes: Dark Matters, (Royal College of Art, 2010)
Exhibitions
‘The Model Worker’, VR piece, Radical Immersions, Watermans Arts Centre, Sep 2019
Virtual Realities + Alterities Manifestation, Royal College of Art, May 2019
CLOSEUP: 10 Years of European Design Projects by the Helen Hamlyn Research Associates at the Royal College of Art 1999–2009, October 2009
Performances
Heated Exchange, Performance, Chelsea Theatre, Jan 2015
Symposia
Virtual Realities and Alterities (VR+A) Cross-College Symposium, 9 May 2019, convenor and chair of the Other Spaces panel
External collaborations
Co-editor with Igea Troiani of Architecture and Culture Special Issue, ‘Space to Learn/Think/Work: The Contested Architectures of Higher Education’ (March 2021)
Current and recent projects
Virtual Realities + Alterities, and the Alterities research cluster
Research funding
AHRC Doctoral Studentship (2011–14)
Interiors Group Bursary (2011–14)
Research interests
Architecture, Silicon Valley, Workplace, Labour, Feminism, Critical Theory, Spatial Design, Experience Design, Virtual Reality, Performance, Politics, Ecology, Environment
