Judit Pusztaszeri

Judit Pusztaszeri is a spatial designer and researcher with an interest in normative social and spatial practices and how they permeate design and teaching practice. Judit’s work has explored this theme in several domains, including architectural sites of memory, ranging from national to domestic and everyday environments.

Judit’s current research looks at the besieging behaviour of the hoarder undermining the concept of home as a haven. She looks to the hoard as a place of insurgence, defying ritualized conduct of daily life and the binary division between permitted and prohibited, the bandwidth of the acceptable. Through the hoarder’s activities, she seeks to explore non-linear modes of ‘construction’ through matter, making space for unscripted action, and exploring the margins of bodily experience to question existing and proposing alternative spatial practices.

Additionally, through her architectural design teaching practice, Judit aims to introduce a pedagogic approach towards a post-carbon-built environment, challenging the status quo of current economic growth mindsets of plenty and permanence. She seeks to foster an appreciation of materials based on the understanding that they carry a sedimentation of cultural values alongside the immaterial knowledge imbued by building materials. This involves not merely taking stock of what is present but understanding why it is there in the first place and what immaterial knowledge is available through the material.

Judit has taught at Brighton since 2016, contributing to undergraduate teaching in BA(Hons) Interior Architecture and postgraduate courses in MA Interior Design and MA Architectural and Urban Studies. Judit is currently the programme coordinator for the third year of the BA(Hons) Interior Architecture course. Through postgraduate studies in Interior Design (MA) and Arts and Cultural Research (MRes), Judit has developed research interests in the relation of power and architecture. Project focuses have included challenging conventional narratives associated with architectural sites of memory in post-communist countries, unmasking embedded spatial practices in everyday environments, and questioning the prevailing but invisible social orders that are perpetuated through the built environment.

Judit applies a critical approach to social and spatial norms in educational contexts. Having worked with the Dis/Ordinary Architecture group, Judit was a participating member of Architecture Beyond Sight (ABS) at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), putting recommendations forward on the design of architectural education for blind and visually impaired people (2018) decentring the hegemony of the visual within design education. Other initiatives include organising a week-long participatory workshop (2019), funded by the Arts Council, that challenged the tokenistic mode of engagement with disability, commonplace in architectural teaching and practice. The workshop enabled more diverse approaches in the first-year curriculum, allowing the unpicking of traditional concepts of normalised bodies in spatial design and challenging biases to find alternate, dis-ordinary positions.

Judit’s most recently published chapter, titled ‘Hoarding Disorder, Schwitters's Merzbau and Its Conflict with Domesticity’, was published by Bloomsbury Publishers in 2022 in the edited volume Domesticity Under Siege. It examines the Merz building activities of Kurt Schwitters not from an art-historical perspective but through the influence the Merz had on the ‘other’ space, the domestic, through the lens of Hoarding Disorder.