Barry Wark
Assistant Professor Adjunct
Barry Wark is a Scottish-born architect, designer, and educator whose practice investigates ecological theory, advanced fabrication, and architectural aesthetics. He is the founder and director of Barry Wark Studio, a New York-based design practice, and serves as a Full-time Lecturer at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, where he leads advanced design studios and graduate seminars exploring ecocentric approaches to architecture, material assemblies, and the aesthetics of weathering. He is currently a PhD Candidate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).
Wark holds a Master of Architecture from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, a BSc in Architecture from the University of Strathclyde, and a RIBA Part 3 qualification from London Metropolitan University. He is registered with the Architects Registration Board (ARB) and is a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). He has held full-time academic posts at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and has held visiting professorships at Columbia GSAPP, Pratt Institute and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology.
Rooted in his formative years in Glasgow — where the city’s climate and material character shaped his sensibility for an architecture attentive to environment and time — Wark’s research and studio practice centres on ecocentric architecture: an approach that draws on non-Western building traditions, the logics of ecological systems, and advanced 3D printing technologies to produce work of deep material and temporal richness. His lectures, delivered at institutions including Harvard GSD, SCI-Arc, Yale, Texas A&M, Seoul National University, and the University of Innsbruck, have established him as a distinctive voice in contemporary discourse on ecology, fabrication, and ecological aesthetics.
Wark’s projects have been exhibited internationally, most notably entering the permanent collection of the Dubai Museum of the Future (Nadarra, 2022) and exhibited at the Venice Biennale (Printed Parts, 2021). His projects and writings have been published widely, including a cover feature and interview in Frame Magazine, features in Dezeen and Vanity Fair, essays in Routledge anthologies, and a contribution to ARCHIGRAM 10, edited by Sir Peter Cook. Nadarra was shortlisted for a Dezeen Award in 2024.
Wark's CV is available here.
Projects
Nadarra
Nadarra is a 3D printed sand wall held in the permanent collection of the Museum of the Future, Dubai. The work gives form to an ecological understanding of matter in which living and inert things are interconnected and the categories of nature and artefact lose their clarity. Its surface sits between registers of the made, the grown and the digital: linear marks recall quarried stone, horizontal contours express the printing process, and bulbous, heterogeneous formations suggest growth rather than machining. By resisting immediate categorisation, the wall invites a second look at what we assume to be natural or artificial. Each interlocking block can be manufactured, installed and recycled up to eight times, embedding the project in circular material systems and pointing towards biome-specific construction for the Gulf.
Glasgow School of Art Extension
A block-wide strategy for the future of Mackintosh's national icon, devastated by two fires, proposing the building be held as a ruin rather than faithfully reconstructed. The retained facade and restored key interiors preserve the historic tour route, while studios move into a new extension, leaving the former art school as a void for exhibitions and gatherings. The extension is defined by a deep, folded facade whose seams and textures catch wind-dispersed seeds, inviting indeterminate plant colonisation and weathering over time. Drawing on the megalithic architecture of Glasgow and the castles and ruins of Scotland, the project asks what it means to inhabit a ruin of such cultural weight, and whether doing so might cultivate an ecological consciousness in the city, a recognition of the impermanence and interconnectedness of what we build.
House by the Sea
House by the Sea works with ambiguity and the uncanny to develop an ecological aesthetic for domestic architecture. Its profile is strangely familiar, reading as both pitched roof and the landscape it sits within, unsettling the boundary between the natural, the artifactual and the synthetic. An assembly of sloped parts with varied textures welcomes its own weathering, the pocketed envelope offering ground for nonhuman colonisation over time. Against the audacity of the white house in the landscape, it proposes an architecture of humbleness and embeddedness within its biome. Inside, spaces akin to ancient rock-cut architecture give the sense of a carved monolith, sheltering inhabitants from coastal weather while opening views across the sea. The project moves from aesthetics driven by ideas of nature towards those driven by ecology.
Printed Parts
The expectation that buildings should last forever, combined with fashion cycles, sees structures under fifty years old demolished and their carbon-expensive, often toxic materials sent to landfill. Printed Parts takes the position that buildings and their elements should be capable of reappropriation and recycling into new components. 3D printed sand makes this tangible: parts can be made, installed, removed and returned to aggregate, conceived here as an architectural-scale system for assembly, disassembly and reuse. Where parts-based systems tend towards repetition, each piece is fabricated individually, maximising file-to-fabrication data limits so every element is optimised to the structural, thermal and aesthetic objectives of the whole. The project delivers on the early promise of 3D printing, producing bespoke, differentiated pieces rarely evident in contemporary printed architecture.
House by the Desert
Set in a mountainous desert region, this retreat is carved by its climate. Procedural systems iteratively calculate the shadows cast by the site's existing rocks, cutting the mass of the house so that angled openings permeate the south facade, drawing diffused light inside and shading external pools that cool the air through evaporation. The main living space faces north through an expansive window towards the mountains. Within, one dwells in a cool, solid mass whose character mixes fabricated and found objects, its pockets and zones offering habitat to plants and local fauna alongside the human inhabitants. From a distance the 3D printed sand structure reads as ancient, cut and assembled from the landscape; up close, printed layers and interlocking blocks reveal its artifactual origins.
Tùr House
Tùr House is a speculative house at a forest edge in upstate New York that takes adaptability, disassembly and long-term material reuse as foundational principles, framing architecture as a system that evolves through repair and reconfiguration rather than a fixed, disposable object. Its envelope is a single material: large-scale 3D printed sand blocks forming a thick, self-supporting outer layer, structurally independent of the steel frame and interiors behind it. Openings are carved into the monolithic elements with recessed glazing, and the fractured geometry allows individual blocks to be added or removed without loss of coherence. Recesses and ledges collect leaves, moss and lichen, making weathering integral to the building's expression; the house is pictured a century on, the forest grown around it.
