Bea Martin is a Portuguese-born, British architect, artist and educator. She is a Senior Lecturer and researcher at the Manchester School of Architecture and is currently undertaking a PhD in Architectural Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
At the heart of her work lies a fascination with the unknown, the unformed, and the not-yet. Bea's practice moves between speculative drawing, visual studies, and experimental architecture, exploring how architecture might be imagined, constructed, and thought otherwise. Through the lens of speculative assemblies, she engages with visual and spatial constructs that resist closure—embracing abstraction, ambiguity, and cross-disciplinary encounters as strategies for unsettling conventional modes of architectural production.
With over fifteen years of experience in practice, including at Richard Rogers and Partners, Bea's work bridges the precision of professional architecture with the open-endedness of experimental inquiry. As founder of Speculative Assemblies, she approaches drawing not as a static image, but as a living apparatus—a site where representation becomes invention, and where architecture emerges as an ongoing negotiation between thought, matter, and form.
In her practice, drawing is never an end in itself, but a continuous unfolding—an active, speculative field where architecture is always in the process of becoming.
CORE TEACHING AREAS
Architecture as Thought Practice
Engaging architectural design through philosophical methods — critical theory, media studies, poetics — outside the conventional boundaries of practice.
Conceptual & Experimental Drawing
Drawing as a method of research, invention, and provocation. Not to describe architecture, but to speculate, fictionalise, and reveal its hidden logics.
Speculative Assemblies
Assemblies not as tectonic construction, but as conceptual, visual, and affective constructs — ways of holding together ideas, fragments, stories, logics, contradictions.
Visual Studies in Architecture
The visual construct not just as output, but as epistemic engine — tracing how visuals generate thought, spatial affect, and forms of knowing.
Radical Methodologies
Working with tools, techniques, and processes that sit outside (or against) architecture’s disciplinary norms — including cinema, notation, AI, narrative, diagram, montage, and performative image-making.
