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People • Faculty

Matthew Allen

Matthew Allen is an architectural historian, theorist, and critic whose work examines the relations among architecture, technology, media, and aesthetics. He studies how technical systems and visual forms organize architectural knowledge, labor, and institutions — and how these arrangements change as they circulate across regions. He is the author of “Flowcharting: From Abstractionism to Algorithmics in Art and Architecture” (ETH / gta Verlag, 2023). His current book project examines the digital transformation of architecture in China through archival research, oral-history interviews, and the study of state-owned design institutes, transnational firms, technical labor, and visual culture. It situates architectural computerization within histories of state planning, global exchange, corporate practice, mega-event development, and changing regimes of collective authorship.

Allen’s scholarship offers a cultural and institutional history of computation. Rather than treating digital technologies as autonomous agents of change, he traces the diagrams, standards, organizations, professional practices, and often-invisible forms of labor through which computational ideas take shape. Flowcharting reconstructs the emergence of algorithmic thinking in art and architecture before the widespread adoption of digital computers, showing how techniques derived from scientific management helped shift design from composition toward organization. His more recent work follows the translation of computational methods and aesthetics among institutions, professions, and regions.

His articles and essays have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Perspectives on Science, Log, The Avery Review, and Architectural Record, among other venues. His research has been supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Graham Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He is editorial director of Architecture Exchange, where he co-edits the “Memo: Writing to Architecture” book series and develops public programs connecting architectural scholarship with contemporary debate. He also organizes international research collaborations and writes criticism on contemporary architecture, with particular attention to China.

At WashU, Allen teaches global architectural history, architectural theory, design research, and creative computation. Together with Senior Lecturer Josh Azzarella, he developed Creative Computation, which introduces programming, algorithms, and artificial intelligence as modes of creative inquiry. Across his teaching, Allen connects historical interpretation with contemporary design practice, preparing students to work critically across archives, texts, images, code, and buildings.

Allen earned a PhD and Master of Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Before joining WashU, he taught at Pratt Institute and the University of Toronto and practiced architecture in New York, Boston, Bangkok, and Shanghai.

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Matthew Allen
Senior Lecturer
Academic programs
Master of Architecture
Bachelor of Science in Architecture
Bachelor of Arts in Architecture
Email
matthew.a@wustl.edu
Office
Givens 201

Select Articles, Chapters, and Publications

By the time the computer arrived on the architectural scene, its place had been prepared by decades of avant-gardist experimentation. The modernist program of rationalizing creative practice took a decidedly bureaucratic turn between two generations of constructivists in the 1930s and 1960s. From Paris to Cambridge, painters, poets, designers, and architects poured their energy into cracking the code of artistic genius in hopes of democratizing the creation of better environments, thus stimulating a nascent repertoire of algorithmic techniques. The motivation to use these new techniques emerged from attempts to understand art and architecture through serial effects. By reformulating their disciplines in terms of flowcharting procedures developed in the field of scientific management, artists and architects enacted a paradigm shift that had long been a cherished dream of modernism, replacing composition with organization as the basis of design.

Select Exhibitions and Presentations

  • “Two Archival Sketches: Shanghai Expo 2010 (TJAD) and Jixi Museum (Atelier Li Xinggang),” presented at Architecture and Ethics of Care, 2026, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

  • “Aesthetic Translations between Media,” presented at Pratt Institute, 2025, Brooklyn, New York.

  • “CAD in the Garden: Charles Moore, Parametrics, and Action Language,” presented at the Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference, 2025, Atlanta, Georgia.

  • “Screenshots as Inscriptions: The Material Basis of the Digital Architectural Imaginary,” presented at Studies in Materialistic Historiography, 2025, Tongji University, Shanghai, China.

  • “The Art of the Screenshot,” presented at Columbia University, 2025, New York, New York.

  • “Systems of Abundance: Degrowth and Architecture,” presnted at Emory University, 2024, Atlanta, Georgia.

Select Awards and Grants

  • 2026 — Connection Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, with Theodora Vardouli

  • 2026 — Faculty Research Grant, WashU Sam Fox School

  • 2025 — Grant, Graham Foundation Grant, Co-editor with Joseph Bedford

  • 2025 — Rome Teaching Fellow, Virginia Tech

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