Luke Pearson

Luke’s research focusses on how videogame technologies can be used in architectural design to promote more direct and public-facing engagement with the built environment. His work is highly interdisciplinary, and draws from architectural design, game design, media and games studies, architectural history and theory, interface design and the scholarship of drawing. He is a co-founder of the design research studio You+Pea with Sandra Youkhana.

His game-based architectural projects have been exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition by You+Pea at the Royal Institute of British Architects combining a historic reading of Picturesque designs with game environments, experienced through projections. Further games have been exhibited at events such as Now Play This at Somerset House, EGX 2019 and the Architekturmuseum der Tum in Munich.

He has also acted as a consultant to industry and cultural institutions, including as Guest Producer for the Serpentine Galleries' Future Art Ecosystems 2: Art x Metaverse strategic briefing.

Luke is co-author of the forthcoming book Videogame Atlas: Mapping Interactive Worlds (Thames & Hudson, 2022), which maps environments from commercial videogames as a way of understanding their spatial composition in an architectural and urban context. He is also the co-editor of Architectural Design: Re-Imagining the Avant-Garde (Wiley, 2019) and Drawing Futures (UCL Press, 2016).

Luke's writings on the relationship between architecture and video game space has been published in journals such as The Journal of Architectural Education, Design Studies and Thresholds and he has also written on the subject for publications such as eflux Architecture. Luke also retains a wider interest in new media, pop culture and gaming culture that has been explored in works such as a commissioned article exploring music festivals held in videogame spaces for Frame magazine, and a survey of Japanese arcade ‘medal games’ for Disegno journal.