Associate ProfessorMatthew Mindrup

PhD, Architecture and Design (VirginiaTech), M.Arch (UPenn), B.Arch (PennState), B.Phil (PennState)

Matthew D. Mindrup is an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney, where he previously served as Program Director of the multidisciplinary Bachelor of Architecture and Environments (BAE) from 2020 to 2025. He is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA) and an internationally recognized scholar in architectural history and theory, with a specialization in the architectural imagination as it shapes environmental thinking, material practice, and adaptive reuse.

His research examines the role of materials, architectural models, and existing buildings in the conception and transformation of new designs, with particular emphasis on adaptive reuse and environmentally responsible practice. Positioned at the intersection of history, theory, and design, his work advances sustainability not as a technical problem alone, but as a cultural and material practice shaped by acts of selection, transformation, and reuse. He is the editor of The Material Imagination: Reveries on Architecture and Matter (Routledge, 2015) and author of The Architectural Model: Histories of the Miniature and the Prototype, the Exemplar and the Muse (MIT Press, 2019), the first comprehensive history of architectural models, now widely used as a core text internationally. His forthcoming monograph, Architecture and the Art of Forgetting: An Exercise in Tactics (MIT Press, 2026), reframes adaptive reuse as a critical environmental strategy through practices of selective erasure, masking, and material transformation.

Mindrup’s teaching integrates historical inquiry with design pedagogy through drawing, modelling, and making, and he has taught internationally across design studios, architectural history, and advanced theory electives. His leadership work includes major curriculum review and renewal initiatives, accreditation-focused revisions, and the coordination of interdisciplinary teaching teams, with a sustained commitment to environmentally responsive architectural education.