Phineas Harper is a British curator, founder and cultural strategist who has become a powerful voice for sustainable and inclusive design through their writing and leadership across major cultural institutions and international initiatives. As Deputy Director of The Architecture Foundation, Harper co-founded New Architecture Writers, now a key platform for diversifying architectural criticism before moving on to serve as Chief Executive of Open City, where they expanded the Open House festival and Accelerate, a nationally recognised mentoring programme for underrepresented youth, and published a number of books including the acclaimed London Feeds Itself edited by Jonathan Nunn. Their print-making and sculpture has been exhibited at the Royal Academy and in solo exhibitions around London. Harper has also given evidence on the intersection of design and political issues to the House of Lords and London Assembly, has lectured on architecture around the world, and curated significant exhibitions and awards such as the Oslo Architecture Triennale and the Architecture Prize of the Province of Styria.
In addition to previously serving as Deputy Editor of The Architectural Review, Harper has contributed to publications such as The Guardian, Financial Times and Dezeen, exploring the social impact of design. Much of their recent work continues to champion inclusive design as a practical and ethical framework—one that broadens participation in the built environment and challenges long-standing assumptions about who architecture serves. Throughout their wide-ranging career, Harper has led with a mission to open and diversify, seeking equitable design for all.
hube: Was there an early experience, place, or encounter that profoundly shaped your understanding of urban planning and the ways we inhabit cities? How did it influence your approach to architecture and design thinking?
Phineas Harper: Browsing the shelves of the British Council library in Kano, in northern Nigeria, where I lived for a time as a teenager, I came across an old copy of The Architectural Review. It was a special issue dedicated to the winners of the Aga Khan Award—a prize given to built projects of community value across the Muslim world. As a kid, I had always assumed architecture was mostly about posh house extensions and shiny skyscrapers, but here were new buildings all over the globe that were fighting poverty, providing essential community infrastructure, and saving precious heritage. Many were humble—a refurbishment of a historic marketplace, for example, or a network of new public lavatories in a deprived neighbourhood—but all were made with care and compassion. Reading that copy of the AR changed my adolescent perspective on architecture and urban planning overnight. I realised that design could have immense societal value. A year later, I enrolled in architecture school.
h: During your time at Open City, what motivated you to push particular agendas or projects? In what ways did the pandemic reshape your leadership style, your understanding of success, or the kinds of impact you wanted to achieve?
PH: Taking on the leadership of a charity dedicated to opening up cities around the world, just as the pandemic forced much of cultural life to close, was a wild challenge. The organisation was in rocky shape when I arrived, and Covid only made things more dicey, but we moved fast, innovated hard, and, in the end, didn’t just survive the pandemic—we emerged stronger and more diverse. Many larger cultural institutions responded to the pandemic feebly—shutting their doors, furloughing staff, and effectively going into hibernation. I took a different approach, using the pandemic as a creative opportunity to build useful and vibrant new cultural programmes for our audiences wherever I could. Five years on, I’m immensely proud of having not just successfully steered Open City through the most challenging period of its three-decade history, but also of growing the organisation, rebuilding its finances, reaching new audiences, and helping launch new architecture festivals from Chile to Mozambique.
h: You’ve consistently focused on projects for young people and future generations. In your view, what crucial gaps exist in contemporary education around architecture and urbanism, and how do your initiatives at Open City seek to address them? How might rethinking education shape the way we design and inhabit our cities?
PH: Educational inequality is severe in the UK. The opportunities available to the well-off minority of children who attend elite schools contrast profoundly with those accessible to state school pupils. Open City has worked with children for many years, but in the past its efforts were fairly untargeted in terms of the backgrounds of the young people it supported. When I took over as Chief Executive, the organisation was using charitable resources to augment the education of extremely privileged, privately educated students, for example, but could have been doing far more to support less well-off children from more diverse backgrounds. I gave the charity a more critical focus in its education work, trebling the scale of its youth programmes and specifically targeting under-represented communities. I would like to hope that if more young people from working-class communities were genuinely empowered by a fairer education system, we would see a fairer built environment as a result.
Courtesy of PHINEAS HARPER
Courtesy of PHINEAS HARPER
