My research interests lie across two broad fields: the interdisciplinary space between architecture, archaeology, and anthropology. And the ‘commons’ understood both as common land particularly in urban contexts and as ideas of ownership and hierarchies of spatial power:
Commons
With a team from various UK universities supported by key ‘open space’ NGOs, I was a Co-Investigator on the recent 3-year AHRC-funded project, Wastes and Strays: The Past, Present and Future of English Urban Commons.
Currently I am guest editor of, and contributor to:
Zambelli, Alessandro; Delsante, Ioanni eds. The Architectural Commons. The Journal of Architecture Special Issue [forthcoming 2023]
Zambelli, Alessandro. “‘Period Property in Sought-after Area’: 2,500 Years of Digging and Building at St George’s Hill”. Journal of Architecture, The Architectural Commons (2023 [forthcoming]).
The Structure of Architectural Interdisciplinarity
The visual and analogical foundations of design-centred disciplines. In particular understanding disciplines as borderless centres of practice which, for design, proceed through the making of, often, visual artefacts, afforded meaning through analogical interconnectedness.
My long-standing interests in the intersections between architecture, archaeology and anthropology, particularly in relation to drawing, have resulted in a single-authored book on this subject: Scandalous Space: between architecture and archaeology (Baunach: AADR Spurbuchverlag, 2019) which was included in REF 2021.
Drawing between Architecture, Archaeology and Anthropology
I make work – drawings and texts – between the historically interconnected disciplines of architecture, archaeology and anthropology. A chapter in Architecture and Anthropology explores some of these parallels:
Zambelli, Alessandro. “Occlusions of the Operational Sequence: A Coincidental Conversation between Robert Matthew and André Leroi-Gourhan in Six Diagrams.” In Architecture and Anthropology, edited by Adam Jasper. London: Routledge, 2018.
The Theory of Architectural Practice
Within architecture itself my research, as well as my lecturing at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, seeks to understand both architectural history and theory, and the professional practice of architecture, as differences of emphasis rather than differences of category; that architecture is the product of a constant shuttling between practice and theory.
Scandalous Artefacts 