Dr Tao DuFour BArch, MPhil, PhD (Cantab), RIBA

Tao DuFour is an architect and spatial theorist. He is Assistant Professor in History and Theory of Architecture and Co-Director of the MArch Programme. Tao’s work investigates questions of embodied spatial experience, intersubjective and intergenerational understandings of architecture, landscape and territory, and the ways in which these both constitute and are embedded in the historicity of environments. His interests are in the phenomenology of perception and corporeity, phenomenological accounts of the experience of spatiality, and their relationship to ethnographic descriptions of space. Tao’s current research focuses on the regional context of the Caribbean and Guianas examining, through photography, ethnographic methods and documentary film, lived spatial and environmental experience. He is particularly interested in the historical and narrative qualities of spatio-environmental experience, drawing on the literary traditions of the region. Tao is currently working on a collaborative documentary film project with post-colonial scholar Natalie Melas and documentary filmmaker Kannan Arunasalam, titled “Possible Landscapes,” a two-year research project investigating environmental experience in the Caribbean with a focus on Trinidad & Tobago. He was awarded, with Melas and Arunasalam, the 2023 SAH Award for Film and Video by the Society of Architectural Historians for their previous documentary short, “We Love We Self Up Here.”

Tao obtained his PhD and MPhil in the History and Philosophy of Architecture from the University of Cambridge and BArch from The Cooper Union. He is a registered architect (RIBA) and held the Rome Prize in Architecture at the British School at Rome. Tao is currently the guest editor of the forthcoming special issue of Future Anterior dedicated to the theme of “Space and Heritage.” He is the author of Husserl and Spatiality: A Phenomenological Ethnography of Space (Routledge 2022), which was awarded the Edwin Goodwin Ballard Book Prize in Phenomenology. Tao is a Fellow of Trinity College.