Andrew Hilton
Andrew Hilton ARB is a BCU Alumnus (1993-2005), an architect, educator, and researcher with over 30 years’ international practice and teaching experience across architecture, interiors, landscape, and urban regeneration. He is the founder of Choral Studio Ltd (UK) and Urban Synthesis (China), practices that bring research, community participation, and stakeholder engagement into the design process. His professional work spans scales from small interior interventions and architectural projects to complex regeneration strategies and large-scale urban masterplans across the UK, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and most extensively, China and the Far East.
At the Birmingham School of Architecture, Andrew has taught across all the major spatial disciplines at undergraduate and postgraduate levels for more than two decades. Before taking on his current role as Course Leader for BA (Hons) Interior Architecture and Design, he was Deputy Course Leader and unit leader for MArch. His contribution has been recognised with BCU’s Excellence in Teaching Extramile Award (Overall Winner, 2012) and inclusion in the School’s centenary “Sphere of Influence” publication.
He has led teaching, design, research, and field teams in diverse contexts worldwide, often in remote rural regions and peri-urban environments. Since 2019, Andrew has also been a practice organiser for UCL’s Bartlett Development Planning Unit SummerLab programme, delivering participatory design workshops in China. Alongside this, he serves as a Board Trustee of ArchDaily 2025 Practice of the Year CatalyticAction, a charity that uses design to empower communities and support children in vulnerable contexts such as refugee camps in Lebanon, and as a design advisory panel member for the city of Qujing, Yunnan Province, China.
Andrew’s research-led pedagogy is centred on spatial agency, collaboration, and participation. He is a strong advocate for the transdisciplinarity of Interior Architecture, seeing it as a field with the capacity to generate creativity, transformation, and positive change across multiple sectors.