https://scandalousartefacts.com
I’m now teaching at the University of Melbourne, having moved from the UK in 2023. I’m a UK-qualified architect and previously an Associate Professor in Architecture at the University of Portsmouth, where I co-led research and innovation and chaired the Faculty Ethics Committee.
I am a managing editor of Architecture and Culture Journal (Taylor and Francis, Q1).
My work sits somewhere between architecture, archaeology and anthropology, usually through drawing, mapping and the messy histories of the commons. At Portsmouth I helped bring the AHRA Annual International Conference 2023 (Situated Ecologies of Care) to the School of Architecture, and I’m now co-guest editing both the Routledge book and the Architecture and Culture Special Issue that grew out of it. I also serve as a Managing Editor of Architecture and Culture.
Much of my recent research comes out of Wastes and Strays, a three-year AHRC project on English urban commons that I worked on with colleagues from several UK universities and open-space NGOs. The book from that project, English Urban Commons: The Past, Present and Future of Green Spaces, has just been published. Earlier this year I also guest-edited the Journal of Architecture Special Issue Architectural Agency and the Commons.
My interest in how architecture intersects with archaeology and material culture started with my Bartlett PhD and later led to my book Scandalous Space (AADR, 2019), which was submitted to REF 2021. That work continues in In-Commons, a current Bartlett–ABP collaboration that I co-lead, exploring writing, fieldwork and creative practice around contemporary commons.
Before all this, I spent over a decade in practice: I co-founded Bates Zambelli Architects in London with Sherry Bates in 2000, and we ran the studio together until 2013.
I’ve stayed active in creative practice here in Australia too – most recently with Beating the Bounds of Melbourne Town Common, shown at Melbourne Design Week 2025. I’m now developing an ARC Future Fellowship proposal on Australia’s colonial common lands, which brings all these strands together in a new way.
Dr Alessandro (Alex) Zambelli
Scandalous Artefacts 