Professor Susannah Hagan is research leader in the School of Architecture, developing research projects and seeking funding for staff research and expansion of the PhD programme.
She is the director of R_E_D (Research into Environment + Design), a London-based research consultancy with a European membership that addresses all scales of environmental design, from low cost/low energy prefab housing to environmentally led urban design.
Trained as an architect, her academic work addresses the historical antecedents and cultural implications of ecological architecture and urban design, and currently the gap between environmentally illiterate urbanism and culturally illiterate environmental design.
Professor Susannah Hagan studied architecture at Columbia University, New York, and the Architectural Association, London, receiving her doctorate from the University of London in 1999 and an EPSRC-funded MPhil from the University of Cambridge in 2003. Her dissertation was the first extended examination of the position of 'environmental architecture' and environmentalism within the history and theory of architecture, and was later turned into the book Taking Shape: The new contract between architecture and nature (2001), a key text in schools of architecture internationally. Earlier she worked at IM Pei, New York, and Shepheard, Epstein and Hunter, London, before joining the The Architects’ Journal for a short-lived career as a journalist.
In the mid-1990s, her interest in the cultural and design implications of environmental performance in architecture led her to a research fellowship at the University of Brighton and to the staff of the Environment and Energy MA at the Architectural Association. In 1998 she was asked to start a Master’s programme at the University of East London, the MA Architecture: Sustainability and Design, which was the first in the subject area to combine technology with history/theory and design. She ran the MA for 10 years until returning to the University of Brighton as professor of Urban Studies in the School of Architecture and Design.
Hagan started R_E_D in 2006, a multidisciplinary environmental research consultancy made up of practising professionals and academics from the UK, Germany, Italy and Sweden. R_E_D works with local authorities in the UK and abroad, private companies and academics.