Pickard Chilton Professor of Architecture, he is Director of Graduate Education in the department of architecture at Iowa State University. His teaching, writing and research addresses the political-economic uses of architecture, the critique of theory and the theory of critique, and the image work of landscape in its historical and contemporary contexts. He has previously taught at the Architectural Association, London, The University of Westminster and the Royal College of Art.
Spencer is the author of the critically acclaimed and widely-cited The Architecture of Neoliberalism (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), and Critique of Architecture (Bauwelt Fundamente/Birkhäuser, 2021). He is currently researching and writing his third book, Architecture and the Ends of Capitalism: Scenes from a Crisis, to be published by Bloomsbury academic in 2025, and is co-editing a forthcoming essay collection on architecture, labour, and class critique.
His essays have been widely published. Spencer has also contributed chapters to many significant collections, including Against the Post-Political (Routledge, 2014), This Thing Called Theory (Routledge, 2016), Landscape and Agency (Routledge 2016), On Power in Architecture (Maska, 2022).
His contribution to Polit(t)ico:
