Thomas Deckker
Thomas Deckker is an architect practicing in London and Brasilia. He is also a Fellow of the Geddes Institute of Urban Design at the University of Dundee, a visiting researcher at the Brazil Institute, King’s College London, and a member of the research steering committee of the School of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, London.
Forthcoming lectures
Rio 1930
Conference: Cosmopolitanism in the Portuguese-Speaking Countries
Brazil Institute, Kings College London 20-21 March 2014.
Thomas Deckker proposes that the development of spaces linked to specifically Brazilian discourses of home, city and landscape in Rio de Janeiro was the major factor in the success of the city in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, and that their abandonment in the 1960s was a disaster from which the city is struggling to recover.
Recent lectures
Life's a Beach: Oscar Niemeyer, Landscape and Women
The Rest is Noise Festival, South Bank, London 6 October 2013
Thomas Deckker discussed landscape and the female nude as generative ideas in Niemeyer's architecture.
BBC Radio 4 7 & 9 December 2012
Thomas Deckker joined Sir Norman Foster and Tony Chapman, Head of Awards at the RIBA, for an obituary of Oscar Niemeyer.
Brasilia: Fictions and Illusions
Brazil Institute, Kings College London 2012
Thomas Deckker proposed that Brasilia, instead of being the cold and inhumane city oppressing its residents through authoritarian architectural doctrines commonly portrayed in the popular, and even scholarly, press, was a pragmatic and successful response to the challenges of urban development in the 1950s.
Thomas Deckker’s architectural practice
Photograph of a model of the superquadra penthouse project, Brasilia. This project and the Magalhães House in Brasilia were exhibited at the RIBA in 2003.
Further information on the RIBA exhibition.