Marcos Cruz is the Director of the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, where he is also a Reader and Studio Master of Diploma/MArch Unit 20. His varied teaching activity as a researcher, tutor and critic has been carried out at University College London and University of Westminster in London, University of California Los Angeles, University of Liverpool, Tunghai University and Feng Chia University in Taiwan, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts School of Architecture in Copenhagen, Oslo School of Architecture, among others.
Cruz studied at the Escola Superior Artística do Porto – ESAP from where he graduated in 1997, while frequenting courses at the ETSAB in Barcelona where he was an exchange student in 2003-04 and 2005-06. After moving to London he gained a master’s degree with distinction in Architectural Design at the Bartlett in 1999 and started a PhD by Design research sponsored by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), which he finished in 2007. His investigations about Neoplasmatic Architecture, which focused on a contemporary discussion about the body and the impact of bio-technology on architecture, won the RIBA President’s Research Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis in 2008.
Back in 2000 he was part of the design team for the Kunsthaus Graz competition with Peter Cook and Colin Fournier (first prize). In 2003 he was also a co-commissioner to the Austrian Ministry of Education for the re-structuring of Viennese schools of architecture.
Cruz founded with Marjan Colletti the atelier marcosandmarjan in 2000, combining the practice and teaching of architecture, along with experimental design research. The work has been extensively published and exhibited. This includes the Actions re Form exhibitions in Coimbra and Munich in 2002, the São Paulo Biennial in 2003, the participation in the Metaflux exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2004 and the solo exhibition Interfaces/Intrafaces at the iCP Hamburg and TU Braunschweig in 2005/06. Apart from numerous exhibition installations, they built two pavilions and the general layout for the 75th Lisbon Book Fair in Portugal and worked on a large entertainment complex in Beijing, which they won as part of an invited competition in 2004. Recently, their project was a runner-up for the invited competition of a sales centre in Cairo.
Cruz is author and editor of a series of publications, including Flesh and Vision (Forum da Maia, 2000), Unit 20 (University of Valencia/ACTAR, 2002), Unpredictable Flesh (Mimesis, 2004), marcosandmarjan – Interfaces/Intrafaces (SpringerWienNewYork, 2005), AD – Neoplasmatic Design (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), and PhD Research Projects 2009 (Bartlett UCL, 2009).
