Craig William McCormack

Craig is a PhD candidate at The University of Western Australia (UWA), in Perth, Australia. He holds an Australian Postgraduate Award, allowing him to research the discipline of Space Architecture and how the built environment in outer space is situated within and impacts the terrestrial discipline of architecture. Craig received an NVQ Level IV in Music from The London Music School in 1999, a Bachelor of Arts (Art) from the Curtin University of Technology in 2006, a Bachelor of Environmental Design from UWA in 2009, and a Masters of Architecture with High Distinction from UWA in 2011. As well as teaching and lecturing at UWA for the past six years Craig is also a director of felix. laboratories, a multi-disciplinary architecture and design practice that, as part of Felix, Giles, Anderson & Goad, were creative directors of the Australian Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, Augmented Australia 1914-2014, utilised augmented reality technology to realise significant, yet unbuilt contemporary and historical Australian architecture.When not teaching and researching at university or designing within felix., Craig enjoys the outdoors leading an active lifestyle, and is an avid runner and climber. Widely travelled, he has climbed Mont Blanc and Mount Kilimanjaro in recent years. He believes that as an academic and a designer it is important to be active and involved in the world in order to design for it and write about it. Recently Craig has taken up the sport of motorcycle racing where he intends to qualify for his race license in the near future and add a little adrenaline to his weekends.

For his Fulbright Postgraduate Scholarship, Craig will conduct research at the University of Houston, in the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture. The project will examine the feedback loop between the space industry and popular culture, such as film, through a study of relevant institutional and private archives, to articulate the cultural role that space exploration has played upon modern culture, and reciprocally, the impact that ideas stemming from popular culture as the ‘imagining’ of a future, or multiple futures has had upon programs of scientific research into manned exploration of space, and which has spawned new fields of research, such as ‘space architecture’. Combining archival, primary, and contemporary research through an ambitious theoretical framework, Craig intends to conceptualise the ‘space project’ within Western culture’s tradition of utopian thought.