Practising Wood in Architecture

James Benedict Brown is Associate Professor of Architecture at Umea University, Sweden. James graduated from the University of Sheffield's School of Architecture in 2008 and in 2012 was awarded his PhD from Queen's University Belfast. His research interests are in critical pedagogy, architecture and wood, and design-build and live projects in architectural education, on which he has published extensively. He is the author of Mediated Space: The Architecture of News, Entertainment and Advertising (2018) and he is the co-editor of A Gendered Profession: The Question of Representation in Space Making (2016) with Harriet Harriss, Ruth Morrow, and James Soane. Forthcoming co-authored and co-edited books include Studio Properties: A Field Guide to Design Education (2025) and Architectural Thinking in a Climate Emergency (2025).

Francesco Camilli is an architect and researcher. Between 2023 and 2025 he was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim, Norway, where he researched how architecture and urban design practices can generate social engagement in the transition of cities towards climate neutrality. Between 2020 and 2022 he was a Research Fellow at the Umea School of Architecture, Umea University, Sweden. Francesco graduated in 2016 from the Faculty of Architecture of Sapienza University in Rome, Italy, where he also obtained his PhD in 2020 from the Department of Architecture and Design. His thesis investigated participatory practices in contemporary architectural design. He has been involved in several research projects and initiatives, ranging from theoretical approaches to the affective dimension of spaces to large-scale Horizon projects linked to the New European Bauhaus initiative, and has presented and published his work internationally.