Fran Edgerley

is an initiator of the new interdisciplinary action research network ab__; a decentralised organisation of people practising more equitable worlds. Through this, they are trying to build knowledge around the invisible structures and dispositions that produce and are reproduced by our social and physical architectures. This includes projects investigating the means and possibilities of land redistribution, the reorientation of power through the delivery of capital projects, improvisation in housing and the hostile UK asylum system.

Prior to working as ab__ Fran was a founding partner of the architecture and design collective Assemble, with whom they worked for 12 years to look critically at the processes producing our built environment. Through work with Assemble, an interest in how the physical world is made evolved into a commitment to build projects with communities, expanding that experience of making and remaking the world. This motivation has been a driving force behind many projects, including Otoprojects, Baltic Street Adventure Playground, Granby Workshop, Transnational Interstate Art Agency, Pioneering Places and House of Annetta. Fran’s practice includes work with democratic education, collective somatic explorations of space and filmmaking. Over the past decade, they have worked on a range of projects—both material and relational—alongside communities in Scotland, England, Portugal, Iceland, Germany, the USA, Holland, Peru, Denmark, and Estonia. Fran intermittently teaches at international academic institutions on the intersection of architecture and adjacent subjects. Fran is a trustee at Baltic Street Adventure Playground.