Sam McElhinney ARB

Programme Director – Architecture

Sam is Programme Director for Architecture at the University for the Creative Arts’ Canterbury School of Architecture; overseeing the BA (Hons) Architecture, MArch and PGCert Part Three courses. He is both an Architect, and the founder and lead researcher of isovists.org, a software platform for advanced spatial analysis. He also continues to keep one foot in practice, as a partner of MUD Architecture, which he founded in September 2012. MUD has ongoing projects including a community centre in South East Kent.

From 2005 to 2012 Sam was a key member of Surface Architects, who twice came third in BD’s Young Architect of the Year Award. Sam was Project Architect and Design Lead for Surface’s highest profile project, a £5 million series of Wayfinding Structures in the 2012 Olympic Park in East London; completed to a demanding timeline, the night before the Opening Ceremony. After leaving Surface he acted as a Design Manager at Jason Bruges Studio, running the design, construction and commissioning of a permanent installation for the WWF Charity.

Sam also has a theoretical and art-based interest in adaptive maze and labyrinth spaces; on graduation from UCL he won the Ambrose Poynter Prize for his thesis 'Labyrinths, Mazes and the Spaces Inbetween’, and in 2010 he won the prestigious ‘Best Paper’ at the European Meeting of Cybernetics and Systems Research in Vienna.