PROFILE
Emeritus Professor William (Bill) Taylor
Started at UWA: 1988
Widely published architecture and humanities researcher
Emeritus Professor William (Bill) M Taylor is a registered architect who has taught architecture and humanities for more than 30 years. He has been published widely and has supervised many PhD graduates.
Bill obtained a Bachelor of Architecture with Honours from Louisiana State University, where he came to understand buildings by means of philosophy, literature and humanities-based learning. He followed his bachelor’s degree with a Graduate Diploma in History and Theory from the Architectural Association in London, where he studied architecture in relation to sociology and politics, and art and power.
His subsequent move to Australia encouraged additional interests in landscape theory and environmental studies. Bill obtained a PhD from UWA with a thesis that identified historical and theoretical grounds for reasoning about nature and the built environment.
He has received more than $1 million in research funding to date, and is currently working on a collaborative project on catastrophe and the built environment, as well as a multi-disciplinary book tentatively titled ‘Building adrift: essays on architecture, ships and the sea’. He is also a founding member of the Eco-Matters research group in the School of Design.
Qualifications:
- BArch (Hons) Louisiana State University
- GradDip (History and Theory) Architectural Association, London
- PhD UWA
Teaching
Supervision
Bill has been supervising PhD students for 26 years, with recent topics including:
- Dr Nicholas Kletnieks (completed 2020) ‘Between "during" and "after" - A theory of demolition, architecture and reinvention of the city’
- Dr Vanessa Galvin (2019) ‘The soul-crafted interior: Governing the domestic inhabitant in Victorian Britain and America 1855-1885’
- Dr Isabel Rousset (2018) ‘Urbanism and the modern state housing, morality, and governmentality in nineteenth-century Germany’
- Dr Majdi Faleh (2018) ‘A holistic ethical system of architecture in the time of globalization: Between Dubai and the Medina of Tunis’
- Dr Saren Reid (2016) ‘Sensory history at the water's edge: an historical and cultural analysis of Australian urban waterfronts in Perth and Cairns’
- Dr Daniel Grinceri (2011) ‘Architecture as cultural and political discourse: case studies of conceptual norms and aesthetic practices'
