Luisa Lorenza Corna and Mark Crinson in conversation with Dubravka Sekulić, City Design Programme Lead.
What does Marxism have to do with architecture, its histories, and its criticism? These questions have been posed before, but they require reassessment in light of the continuous expansion (and revision) of Marxism in response to new global crises. The edited collection Struggles in the Concrete takes up this challenge, bringing together a group of international scholars to examine the entanglement of architecture and capitalism through the prisms of labour, gender, environment, and race.
Using different thematic sections of the book as starting points for discussion, the editors and contributors will continue their debate while engaging RCA students and staff in a broader conversation about the stake of architectural criticism today.
Mark Crinson is an art and architectural historian, and now an independent scholar who taught for many years at Manchester University and at Birkbeck (University of London). He works on coloniality and architecture, architecture and industry, and on infrastructure. Among his recent books are Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022) and Rebuilding Babel: Internationalism and Modern Architecture (2017). His book Aviationland: Heathrow and the Making of an Airport Landscape will be published in Spring 2026.
Luisa Lorenza Corna is an art historian and writer, and a lecturer at UWE Bristol. Her research lies at the intersection of politics, art, and architectural theory, with a particular focus on Marxism, theories of the city, and the influence of feminist epistemologies on art theory. She is co-editor (with J. Mascat) of Feminism in Revolt (2023), the first anthology of English translations of the feminist art historian Carla Lonzi’s writings, and of The Architecture of Participation (MIT Press, forthcoming 2025), a study of Giancarlo De Carlo’s work on design education. She is also a regular contributor to Art Monthly.
Dubravka Sekulić is an architect, theorist and educator. Her work connects spatial knowledges and political emancipation, thinking with solidarities and struggles from below, she proposes minor planning as the articulation of these approaches. She is the MA City Design Programme Lead at the Royal College of Art, London (UK). She holds a PhD from gta the Institute for History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich (CH), on the relationship between the Yugoslav construction industry and the Non-aligned Movement. With Godofredo Periera she is working on an edited volume “Take Back the Land: Architecture, Land, and Liberation” (Bloomsbury, 2027). She is the author and editor of several books, including “Glotzt Nicht So Romantisch! On Extralegal Space in Belgrade” (Jan van Eyck Academie, 2012), “Exhibiting Matters” (jovis, 2018) with Milica Tomić, “Curatorial Design: A Place Between”, co-edited with Wilfried Kuehn (Lenz, 2025), “Geography with John Berger: Questions of Space and Practice” co-edited with Ben Garlick (Bloomsbury, 2025). She collaborated with artist and filmmaker Ana Hušman onDon’t Trace, Draw! (2020), a film that explored the spatial legacy of the Yugoslav pedagogical reform. Her interest in pedagogy and public spatial knowledge extends beyond her academic work and takes form in many collaborations including Memory of the World/Public Library with Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak, New Schools for Spaces with Jonathan Solomon and Elise Hunchuck and Curriculum Revolution with Charlotte Malterre-Barthes. Dubravka curated Peti Park: A Struggle for Everyday (2010) and Zoran Bojović: Three Points of Support (2012), and lectures and exhibits widely in Europe and North of America.