Neil Alexander Spiller (born 22 October 1961) is an English visionary architect, artist, professor emeritus and editor of Architectural Design (AD). He is widely regarded as a 'paradigm-shifting' theorist in the architectural discourse. Spiller is known for being the founding director of the Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research Group (AVATAR), a think tank established at The Bartlett, University College London (UCL), which pioneered the implementation of digital theory in architecture. Outside of academia, he is best known for his long project and paracosm, Communicating Vessels (1998–present).
Stylistically, Spiller produces what he terms 'interstitial drawings', created with reference to the conventions of architectural drawing but often representing structures unable to be built outside of virtual space. He is a champion of the notion that architecture must not be bound to the tangible. As he writes: '[m]y preoccupation is to compositionally straddle the virtual and the actual, art and matter'.
Early life and education Spiller was born in Tankerton, a suburb Whitstable, England, and raised in the village of Sturry. He was educated initially at Sturry Primary School before attending the Geoffrey Chaucer School in Canterbury from age 11 to 18. His parents were Arthur George Spiller, an electrician and petty officer in the Royal Navy, and Betty Ella (née Everett). His maternal grandfather was Walter Oliver Everett, a building contractor who constructed the Marlowe Theatre in Canterbury. His paternal grandfather, Sidney Spiller, was apprenticed at Windsor Castle as a gardener during the latter part of Queen Victoria's reign.
Spiller began training as an architect in London, in the early 1980s. He submitted a sketch of a great crested grebe as part of his application to Thames Polytechnic (now the University of Greenwich), which gained him admission. Spiller describes the Polytechnic's sensibilities during his time as a student as adhering to the 'tasteful Modernism of the Cambridge School'. He refers to architects of this movement, such as Sir Leslie Martin, as 'Jesuit Modernists', bound by design principles such as form follows function and the prohibition of ornament which Spiller regards as emblematic of 'architectural guilt'. Instead, he became enamoured of more disruptive, post-structuralist approaches which were gaining traction at this time through the work of architects such as Lebbeus Woods, Daniel Libeskind and Michael Webb. Spiller took great inspiration from these architects' aesthetic philosophies, attending many of their exhibitions at the Architectural Association (AA). At this time, Spiller formed a connexion with Cedric Price, on whom he wrote his third-year dissertation, 'Right Price, Wrong Time'.
He also took an interest in traditional British architectural movements, such as the Gothic Revival, particularly the work of William Burges, Harry Stuart Goodhart-Rendel and Augustus Pugin, and writing his diploma thesis on Harrow School, ecclesiology and the revival of Queen Anne style architecture. He graduated from Thames Polytechnic in 1987 as an RIBA Silver Medal finalist.
Career
Spiller Farmer Architects After graduating, Spiller moved to Blackheath and formed the practice Spiller Farmer Architects with fellow Thames Polytechnic alumnus Laurie Farmer in 1987. The two would collaborate on architectural drawings, dividing card-stock between themselves to produce what Spiller terms 'schizophrenic drawings'. These early works largely focused on objects isolated from their spaces rather than drawing spaces themselves, contextualised by objects. An early example of this is their Vitriolic Column (1986), with Spiller citing Charles Jencks as an early influence. Spiller Farmer also produced plans for Milwaukee and Genoa made anew, with reference to Le Corbusier's ambition to redesign Paris. Much of this early work was published contemporarily in the magazine Building Design.
The Spiller Farmer practice was based in London and opened offices in Bratislava in 1990. The same year they published their early drawings in a collection titled Burning Whiteness, Plump Black Lines, with Cedric Price introducing the volume. Spiller incorporated much of Price's philosophy of architecture around this time, chiefly his ideas regarding architecture as an enabling and liberating technology. Due to the economic recession, Spiller Farmer Architects was dissolved in 1995. Farmer however remained in Slovakia and continued to work under the practice's name. His company eventually diversified into real estate consultancy, being re-founded in Zagreb in 2003.
The Bartlett, UCL
Burning Whiteness, Plumb Black Lines gained Spiller recognition as an emerging talent. In the early 1990s, he was approached in a bar by Sir Peter Cook who recruited him to The Bartlett. In lieu of Farmer, Spiller began working with Philip 'Mad Phil' Watson who was recruited to The Bartlett's faculty around the same time and the two continued to teach together until 2018. In 1991, the two travelled to New York City with the staff of Watson's previous institution, Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham City University). There Spiller purchased the book Cyberspace: the First Steps (1991), edited by Michael Benedik, which inspired a new preoccupation with cyberspace and nanotechnology. On this subject, he wrote Digital Dreams – Architecture and the Alchemic Technologies from 1993–95, publishing it in 1998.
In 1992, Spiller was invited to include his work in AD's Theory and Experimentation exhibitions at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) and the Royal Academy of Arts (RA) alongside those who had inspired him, such as Cook, Lebbeus Woods, Daniel Libeskind, Bernard Tschumi and the Coop Himmelb(l)au firm. Woods in particular championed Spiller's work and two years after the exhibition, Spiller was asked to guest edit an issue of AD. Working alongside Martin Pearce, he produced the seminal Architects in Cyberspace (1995), the first journal publication to explore the intersections between cyberspace and architecture. The issue included contributions from architects such as Tschumi and William Mitchell; artists like Ian Hunter, Roy Ascott, Madeline Gins and Stelarc; as well as theorists such as Sadie Plant and Nick Land, who together would found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) later that year.
Around 1993, Spiller was commissioned by his girlfriend, a psychologist, to design a desk. Spiller did so, representing in its sculptural elements vats of swirling nanotechnological material. The piece was built by sixteen*(makers). After Spiller and the client's relationship ended, she returned the desk to him, worrying that it would pose a danger to her infant.
As Diploma and MArch Director between 1993 and 2010, Spiller revolutionised the teaching at The Bartlett, the reputation of their degree programmes coming to be regarded as some of the best in the world at that time. During this time, he also occupied a visiting professorship as a John and Magda McHale Research Fellow, State University of New York in 2002. By 2011, The Bartlett's students had won the RIBA President's Silver Medal an unprecedented six times, winning more often than any other institution over a period of 18 years. Spiller would rise to become Vice-Dean under Christine Hawley before leaving The Bartlett in 2010.
The University of Greenwich In 2010, Spiller was approached by Lady Blackstone and asked to head and reinvigorate the University of Greenwich's School of Architecture, as he and Cook had done at The Bartlett. At the time, the university was planning to erect a new building for the School, designed by Heneghan Peng Architects and situated opposite Nicholas Hawksmoor's St Alfege Church. Spiller accepted and brought several of the more radical and experimental members of The Bartlett's faculty with him to Greenwich. By 2013, Spiller had been named Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and Deputy Pro-Vice-Chancelor. In 2018, Spiller left the university. Subsequently, Spiller occupied a visiting professorship and the position of Visiting Azrieli Critic at Carleton University, from 2020–22; as well as a visiting professorship at Università Iuav di Venezia, Italy, in 2021.
Architectural Design (AD) Due to the success of Architects in Cyberspace, AD asked Spiller to edit another in 1998, this time a monograph on his work up until that point, titled Maverick Deviations. He would go on to guest edit several more editions of AD including the influential Protocell Architecture with his former PhD student, Rachel Armstrong.
From 2008 to 2010, Spiller authored a regular column for AD titled 'Spiller's Bits'; in 2018, he became the publication's editor. Prior to this, Spiller had been the editor of Building Design Interactive magazine and sat on the board of both AD and Technoetic Arts Journal. He had also previously contributed to the Architects' Journal (AJ), BBC Future, The Architectural Review, and Architectural Record.
AVATAR Group In the early 1990s, The Bartlett had adopted a hermetic 'unit' system where the faculty formed student groups of 15–17 members led by a distinguished tutor and separated by research area. Under Spiller's auspices, many of the School's faculty and students had become engaged in some form of digital theory. In 2004, Spiller founded a special inter-unit collective called 'Advanced Virtual and Technological Architectural Research', known as the AVATAR Group or Laboratory. AVATAR had its own dedicated Master's and Doctorate programmes. Bruce Sterling writes of AVATAR as an 'interdisciplinary research agenda [that] explores all manner of digital and visceral terrain and considers the impact of advanced technology on architectural design, engaging with cybernetics, aesthetics and philosophy to develop new ways of manipulating the built environment'. AVATAR quickly grew into an international think tank and research centre, pioneering the discourse surrounding the impact of advanced technologies on architectural design.
In 2008, AVATAR was described in the press as '[m]ore like an extraordinary megalomaniac art collective than a student seminar, AVATAR doesn't design buildings – it designs futures'. Two years later, Spiller and Rachel Armstrong's work on protocells, a key research area for AVATAR, was featured in Nature.
Communicating Vessels
Background and Interpretation In 1998, tiring of moving quickly from one project to the next, Spiller embarked upon his ongoing long project, Communicating Vessels, an artistic and literary paracosm which Spiller has variously described as 'autobiograph[ical]', 'psychogeographical', and, with reference to the work of Dame Frances Yates, 'memory theatre'. As of 2018, Spiller estimated that there are approximately 1000 drawings associated with the project. The name Communicating Vessels' is an allusion to André Breton's Les Vases Communicants (1931). Spiller has said that the Vessels project has 66 sub-titles including 'Rude Mechanicals', 'Critical Paths' and 'Slam-houndian Surrealism', a reference to the opening sentence of William Gibson's Count Zero (1986).
At the project's inception, Spiller drew inspiration from Daniel Liberskind's Chamber Works (1983), Michael Webb's Temple Island (1987), Ben Nicholson's Appliance House (1990) as well as the prose of Francesco Colonna's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499), intending to design his project's spaces and objects to reflect motifs of Surrealist art and theory. Most notably, Communicating Vessels references Alfred Jarry's 'Pataphysics and its three declensions: anomaly, hybridity and clinamen.