Maria McLintock

Maria McLintock is a curator and researcher whose work interrogates how architectures of conflict, migration, and governance take material form. She began her curatorial practice in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA before moving to the Design Museum, London, where she developed exhibitions and research examining the infrastructures through which states, institutions, and communities negotiate power. She holds an MA in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Situated within critical spatial practice, McLintock works between curatorial, textual, and organiser modes to trace how the built environment participates in the production of containment logics, forms of visibilisation, and the uneven distributions of care and control. Her work treats architecture not as a static object but as a field of force – shaped by contested histories, shifting borders, and the frictions between what is sanctioned, what is suppressed, and what persists.

Raised on the border of Northern Ireland, McLintock brings a lived understanding of division and its spatial afterlives. Her research examines the cultural and political grammars of bordering through the post-conflict urban terrains of Belfast and Derry, where architecture continues to hold memory, fracture, and the slow, provisional labour of coexistence.

McLintock is also a co-director of System of Systems, a long-term research platform investigating the spatial, bureaucratic, and technological architectures that structure migration across and beyond Europe. This work examines how infrastructures – documents, databases, checkpoints, routes – shape the choreography of movement and immobility, and how these systems might be unsettled, reconfigured, or refused.

Across her practice, McLintock attends to architecture’s entanglement with conflict, migration, and ecological precarity. She seeks ways to surface occluded narratives, disrupt dominant representational frames, and cultivate modes of practice capable of confronting the spatial orders that determine who is seen, who is bordered, and who is permitted to inhabit otherwise.

Publications

McLintock, M., Io, D. and Glyn-Blanco, R. (eds.) (2024) System of Systems: Outsourcing and Extraction. Managing Displacement. London: Antenne Books.

McLintock, M. (2024) (ed.) Tim Burton: Designing Worlds. London: Thames & Hudson.

McLintock, M. (2023) ‘The Stitch’, MacGuffin, Issue 13.

McLintock, M. (2022) ‘Migrating Relations / Making Space for Becoming’, Migration: Arts Cabinet, March, pp. 45–50.

McLintock, M. (2022) ‘The Moment’, e-flux Architecture, “Solicited: Proposals”, February.

McLintock, M. (2022) ‘How Willie Doherty’s Border Incident Bridged a Gap to an Irish Past I’d Let Myself Forget’, Elephant Magazine, February.

Curtin, G., Leloup, J-Y. and McLintock, M. (eds.) (2021) Electronic: From Kraftwerk to The Chemical Brothers. London: Design Museum Publishing.

McLintock, M. (2021) ‘Peace-walls, Flags and Dark Passages in Belfast’, Materia Arquitectura, 20 “Representation Technologies”, September, pp. 38–47.

McLintock, M. (2021) ‘In the interface: unbuilding Belfast’s dividing walls’, The Architectural Review, August.

McLintock, M. (2021) ‘The Peace Walls at the Centre of Recent Unrest in Northern Ireland’, Failed Architecture, June.

King, E. and McLintock, M. (eds.) (2020) Designs of the Year. London: Design Museum Publishing.

McLintock, M. (2020) ‘Is The Freeport Set to Become The Defining Architecture of Post-Brexit Britain?’, Failed Architecture, July.

Galilee, B. and McLintock, M. (eds.) (2019) Designs of the Year. London: Design Museum Publishing.

McLintock, M. (2019) ‘Soft Landing’, Ossian Journal, November, pp. 89–101.

McLintock, M. (2019) ‘Lives laid along the line: the lived realities of the borderlands’, The Architectural Review, July.

Io, D., Glyn-Blanco, R. and McLintock, M. (eds.) (2017) System of Systems: Technology, Territory, Agency. System of Systems.