Max Wisotsky is a Swedish-American designer, architectural historian and theorist from Los Angeles, California. He holds a BArch from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, and an MA in Architectural History from the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.
His practice sits at the intersection of architectural history and theory, ecological urbanism, critical spatial practice, and more-than-human approaches to architecture, exploring how architecture shapes and is shaped by relationships between people, places, cultures and the wider living world. He is particularly interested in the narratives architecture produces about place, and in the histories, ecologies and forms of life that are often excluded from conventional architectural accounts.
Alongside his research, Max is committed to architectural education as a creative and critical practice. He develops approaches to teaching that integrate architectural history, theory and design through storytelling, writing, material culture and close reading of the built environment. His aim is to support students in developing imaginative, critical and socially engaged architectural practices.
He welcomes interdisciplinary collaboration, particularly work that connects architecture with environmental humanities, cultural geography, anthropology, creative writing, landscape and ecology.
For Max, architecture is not only about designing buildings, but about asking how built environments shape whose stories are told, whose worlds are valued, and what kinds of relationships become possible.
- Architectural History, Theory & Criticism
- Site-Writing & Critical Spatial Practice
- Marxist ecological theory
- Ecological Urbanism
- More-than-human agency in architecture
- Climate resilience and environmental justice
- Community and public engagement
- Fellow of Advance HE (2022)
- Higher Education Teaching Qualification, SEDA (2022)
- PG Cert in Teaching Higher Education (2022)
- MA Architectural History, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (2018)
- BArch, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo (2015)
- Diploma: Indigenous People’s Studies, Österlens Folkhögskola (2010)
- AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association)
- SAH (Society of Architectural Historians)
- SAHGB (Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain)
- EAHN (European Architectural History Network)
- BA (Hons) Architecture
- MArch
Max’s research examines architecture as part of wider social, cultural and environmental systems. His current work focuses on extraction, landscape and more-than-human agency, with a particular emphasis on Kiruna/Giron in northern Sweden, where over a century of iron mining has destabilised the ground and driven the relocation of the city centre. Through archival research, interviews and creative site-writing, this work explores how architecture might be rethought if the agency of landscapes, materials, animals, plants and other forms of life were taken seriously alongside human experience.
Max has been a dissertation supervisor for the MArch (Part II) dissertation module Special Study, since 2023.
- Wisotsky, M. (April 2026) ‘Kiruna 4-ever” Rifting: The New Urban Plan for Kiruna/Giron’, Society of Architectural Historians, Mexico City 2026 (Conference)
- Wisotsky, M. (Nov 2024) ‘Subterranean Feelings: Non-Human Agencies & Architectural ‘re-worlding’ in Northern Sweden’, Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA), Body Matters (Conference)
- Wisotsky, M. (Nov 2022) ‘Ode to a Patch of Weeds: Non-human agencies & authentic architectures’, Radical Architectural Practice for Sustainability (RAPS), Radical entanglements: Architectures, Societies, Environments, Politics (Conference).
- Byrne, K., King, A., and Wisotsky, M. (April 2022) Collaborative action research on ‘Investigations into Models of Peer Observation of Teaching in a School of Architecture & Design’, Architecture Media Policy Society (AMPS), A Focus on Pedagogy: Teaching, Learning, Research in the Modern Academy (Conference).
- Wisotsky, M. (2021) Extractive Architectures: Ore Bodies Over Human Bodies, Paper for Emerging Architectural Research (P.E.A.R), Issue #8: GLOBAL/LOCAL.
https://pureportal.bcu.ac.uk/en/persons/max-karlsson-wisotsky-5/
