Matthew Mindrup: Architecture Forgets

Matthew Mindrup proposes an alternative way of understanding the transformation of the built environment, challenging architectural discourse’s tendency to celebrate memory as an unquestioned virtue while treating forgetting as loss or failure. Buildings and cities, he argues, endure not by remaining unchanged but by repeatedly relinquishing what they once were. Drawing on historical and contemporary examples of architecture, art, ritual, and theories of memory and perception, Mindrup explores forgetting as a deliberate and generative art: one that loosens established relationships among form, use, identity, and meaning.

Mindrup is an architect, scholar, and associate professor of architecture at the University of Sydney, where he directed the multidisciplinary Bachelor of Architecture and Environments from 2019 to 2025. He is a senior fellow of the Higher Education Academy and has taught architecture at institutions in the United States, Switzerland, Canada, and Australia, with recent appointments as a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania and as a visiting professor at Virginia Tech’s Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center.

His research, creative practice, and teaching are connected by a deceptively simple question: how do architects imagine something that does not yet exist? Working across architectural history, theory, and design, he investigates how materials, models, found objects, and acts of making allow ideas to acquire form.