Scott Batty

Scott Batty is an architect and architectural educator whose work explores the relationship between architectural education, professional practice and the realities of building construction. He taught at the University of Westminster for 15 years, where he developed the Site Diary module, requiring architecture students to repeatedly visit live construction sites. The project forms the basis of his research Sites of Learning: Building Site Learning in Architectural Education.

Batty grew up in rural Lincolnshire as the son of a carpenter and joiner, which meant building sites were part of life long before architecture school. During the 1990s he worked as a construction volunteer with Frontiers Foundation in Northern Ontario, Canada, helping Indigenous communities construct timber-framed homes, and later with APARE restoring historic churches and a castle in France and Belgium.

He studied architecture at Leeds Polytechnic and the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London before working at Allford Hall Monaghan Morris. He later co-founded the architectural practice HUT, which he ran for ten years.

Batty is also slowly (very slowly) completing the retrofit of his own 1970s house in St Albans, a project that has won awards and may one day actually be finished...