Mike Dring

Dr Michael Dring is an academic, researcher and architect. His recently completed PhD entitled ‘Revealing the Institutional Order of Birmingham - A Study of Paradise Circus and Associated Institutions’ offers a hermeneutic interpretation of literary institutions through archival research and drawing. The search for continuity as a counter to the modernist idea of progress represents an underlying tension in the his work and has ongoing implications for the civic order and ecology of the city. He is interested in the study of archives, buildings and the city, seeking more subtle and comprehensive modes of historical and humanistic understanding. The recovery of references – architectural, artistic, cultural, ecological - leads to an understanding of deep spatial structures. These concerns are given contemporary relevance by the climate crisis and the need to conserve resources. Questions of conservation and adaptive reuse, of embodied carbon and of memory, therefore, inform his work.