Neil Leach is a British architect and theorist.[1] He is also a licensed architect, registered to practice in the United Kingdom.
Leach holds a Master of Arts degree and a Diploma of Architecture degree from the University of Cambridge, and a Doctor of Philosophy degree from the University of Nottingham.
He is Professor at Florida International University, the European Graduate School and Tongji University. He has also taught at the Architectural Association School of Architecture, Harvard University, Columbia University, Cornell University, SCI-Arc, University of Southern California, University of Nottingham, University of Bath, University of Brighton, Dessau Institute of Architecture, Royal Danish Academy of Art, and Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. He is currently the Director of the Doctor of Design program at Florida International University. He is an academician within the Academy of Europe, and has also been a NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Fellow. He is co-founder of DigitalFUTURES.
Leach's initial research interests focused on the Italian Renaissance. His first publication was a translation from the Latin of de re aedificatoria, the fifteenth century treatise on architecture written by Italian humanist, Leon Battista Alberti. The translation was undertaken under the supervision of Joseph Rykwert.
Subsequently, his interests shifted into the realm of contemporary architectural theory, and he developed a particular interest in Continental Philosophy and its potential impact on architectural thinking. Leach's position in regards to architectural theory was first set out in the "cultural reader" he edited, Rethinking Architecture (1997). The book contained a selection of well-known writings about architecture written by thinkers within Continental Philosophy, ranging from Hermeneutics and Phenomenology to Structuralism and Deconstruction, prefaced by Leach's own introductions. Among the authors included were: Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Walter Benjamin. What the selection set out to represent was a rethinking of architectural practice; making it a critical activity, not simply accepting the given paradigm, while at the same time placing architecture within the realm of cultural studies. He subsequently published a series of edited volumes and monographs based on material from that book.
His work then developed in the direction of materialism and computation, inspired in part by the work of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda but also by new scientific thinking. This informs his curatorial work and design teaching which engage extensively with scripting and digital fabrication. He is the co-recipient of two NASA grants to explore the potential use of the robotic fabrication technology, Contour Crafting, for building structures on the Moon and Mars.
Currently, he is working in the field of architecture and artificial intelligence, where he has published two books, Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction to AI for Architects and Machine Hallucinations: Architecture and AI, and has contracts to publish three more. He also engages with the field of neuroscience.
Leach has been involved extensively in China, where he directed the American Academy in China for several years. He was the co-curator (with Xu Weiguo) of the A2 Exhibition of Avant-Garde Architecture at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2004, the Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies Exhibition at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2006, the (Im)material Processes Exhibition at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2008, and the Machinic Processes Exhibition at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2010. He was also the co-curator (with Roland Snooks) of the Swarm Intelligence: Architectures of Multi-Agent Systems Exhibition in Shanghai in 2010, and (with Philip Yuan) of the DigitalFUTURES Exhibition in Shanghai in 2011 (with Philip Yuan) of the Interactive Shanghai Exhibition in Shanghai in 2013, and (with Xu Weiguo) of the Design Intelligence: Advanced Computational Research Exhibition in Beijing in 2013, and the Digital Factory: Advanced Computational Research Exhibition in Shanghai in 2015. Since 2011 he has co-curated (with Philip Yuan) the annual DigitalFUTURES exhibitions in Shanghai. He currently holds a Professorship at Tongji University, where he is a PhD supervisor.
His books have been translated into eight different languages, including Spanish, Chinese, Romanian, Portuguese, Korean, Polish, Persian and Macedonian.