Pressure Points: Risk - Liam Ross / RIOT, MAS UTD

Speaker: <a href="https://www.eca.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-liam-ross"><u>Liam Ross</u></a> is an architect and senior lecturer in Architectural Design at the University of Edinburgh, with a focus on building standardisation as a mode of architectural design, and in particular on fire-safety regulation. He also examines how those standards produce surprising side-effects as they are reinterpreted in practice. His book Pyrotechnic Cities: Architecture, Fire-Safety and Standardisation was published by Routledge in 2022, and describes the way that architectural design is an instrument of political agency.  His work has been exhibited and published widely, including in Architectural Research Quarterly (arq), Arch+, and journalistic outlets such as Blueprint, Prospect, and Volume. Ross has experience of practice in the UK and US, including a period of 5 years with Malcolm Fraser Architects, and maintains a relationship with professional practice as co-founder of ESALA Projects, a consultancy offering pro-bono and for-fee design services to public and third-sector clients. His most recent work, published in January 2026 in Architectural Research Quarterly, includes a co-authored article with Jon Goodbun entitled ‘Design and the extended building site: Ecologies of production and the production of ecologies’, which reframes the building site as an 'extended' socioecological system reaching across the global supply chains, material extraction, and labour that construction depends on, arguing that building is an ecological and political process rather than a purely material one. Organiser: RIOT, MAS UTD <p>“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a<br> clean scientific subject”<br> Mary Douglas, <em>Risk and Blame,</em> 36.<br> <br> As the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, mater