Email: portico-services@ucl.ac.uk
Help Desk: http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ras/portico/helpdesk
- Lecturer in Architecture
- The Bartlett School of Architecture
- Faculty of the Built Environment


My research is concerned with discovering & exploiting creative reciprocities between music as constructed sound, & architecture as constructed space. I aim to establish a mode for transdisciplinary practice between the interconnected fields of architecture, acoustical engineering, music composition & performance.
Historically, architectural space has played a highly active role in influencing the experience & composition of music. The Dutch renaissance composer Adrian Willaert is famed for having supposedly invented polychoral, antiphonal music as a response to the spatially-opposed positioning of choir lofts in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice. Conversely, architects & engineers have long acknowledged the desires of music in space. Long before Acoustics was a formally recognised discipline, Roman architect & engineer Vitruvius discusses a method for enhancing the sonic character of theatres & performance spaces by embedding echea or acoustic vases in the walls. Despite these examples, only a small handful of spatiosonic practitioners have managed to rigorously explore interactive parallels between musical space & physical space in their work. American composer Henry Brant produced many spatial compositions, with a view to exploring the idea that aspects of physical space (particularly distance & direction) are as compositionally active as the musical elements of tone & timbre.
www.ekm.works/
Since September 2016, Emma-Kate has been running a Masters in Architecture design unit with teaching partner Nat Chard (unit 25).
"The core of our unit involves helping each student develop their own experimental practices, both in their approach to design and in the media through which they think and work. In our experience an experimental approach fosters rich design potential while also providing a productive educational method. We value the way that working experimentally through materials and processes can open up possibilities that might elude us when working with more conventional design methods. We encourage speculative risk and not knowing where the idea will end. To operate like this we look for rigour when nurturing the relationship between idea and technique, looking for ways in which each student might develop or invent their own media and be in control of it on their own terms. We are much more interested in the literal and figurative manifestation of the idea than in the diagram."
- Nat Chard & Emma-Kate Matthews
01-MAY-2020 | Lecturer | The Bartlett School of Architecture | University College London, United Kingdom |
25-SEP-2017 | MPhil /PhD Candidate | The Bartlett School of Architecture | University College London, United Kingdom |
05-SEP-2015 – 30-APR-2020 | Senior Teaching Fellow | The Bartlett School of Architecture | University College London, United Kingdom |
2013 | Professional Practice | London Metropolitan University | |
2011 | Diploma | University College London | |
2011 | Master of Architecture | University College London | |
2008 | Bachelor of Architecture | University of Nottingham |