Dr Fiona Smyth is an Assistant Professor in Architectural History and Theory. Her research lies at the interface between the history of architecture and the history of science. She is particularly interested in the history of environmental design and its fundamental relevance to cultural studies of sound and the history of ideas. Her approach draws strongly on archive work, field work, iconography, and the reception of musical and architectural ideas. It utilises the solid structures of architecture and material culture to identify and explore the intangible aspects of ideas and interdisciplinary interactions.

Her book, Pistols in St Paul’s: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Manchester University Press) investigates musical and architectural experiments in the twentieth century, exploring the concept of building as instrument, and examining how ideas in music and science became manifest within architectural design. In 2022, she was awarded a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant for the project Spectres & Camouflage: The Sound of Silence, a five-year undertaking that examines the cross-disciplinary transfers and transformations of knowledge that shaped environmental design for silence in the twentieth century. Her research has been supported by grants from European, British, Irish and US sources including the European Commission, the British Society for the History of Science, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Creative Arts at MIT, and the Royal Irish Academy.

Voices feature strongly in her work, in terms of advocating for inclusion and inclusive practices in education, and also in terms of demonstrating the voices and expert ears of different groups of people whose historical contributions to architecture and acoustics are often overlooked. She is a firm advocate for EDI and chairs the School and Faculty EDI forums. She is Co-director of the M.Arch Programme.  

Selected Publications

Smyth, F. (2024). Pistols in St Paul's: Science, Music, and Architecture in the Twentieth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press

Smyth, F. (2024) Faith not Works: Chance Encounters and the Origins of Britain’s first Consultancy in Architectural Acoustics, in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 83, 4, pp. 505-524, https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2024.83.4.505

Smyth, F. (2024) Mysterious Changes in Molecular Structure: Pragmatics, Poetics and Designing for Musical Tone in Sound, Music and Architecture, pp. 225-42. (Illiano, R. ed.) Turnhout: Brepols

Smyth, F., & Tzotzkova, V. (2021). Experiments in Experience: Listening to Rooms and Pianos. In W. Brookes (Ed.), Experience, Music, Experiment: Pragmatism and Artistic Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press

Smyth, F. (2019). 'A Matter of Practical Emergency': Herbert Baker, Hope Bagenal, and the Acoustic Legacy of the Assembly Chamber in Imperial Delhi. Architectural History, 62, 113-144. doi:10.1017/arh.2019.5

Awards and Prizes

Shortlisted Royal Historical Society Book Award (2025) for 'Pistols in St Paul's

Shortlisted Architectural Book Award (2025) for 'Pistols in St Paul's'

Shortlisted History of Science Society Davis Book Prize (2025) for 'Pistols in St Paul's'

European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant, (€1.5 million) for 'Spectres and Camouflage' (2022)

Hawksmoor Medal for Architectural History (2017), awarded by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain

Stanley Smith Prize for Construction History (2014), awarded by the Construction History Society

Newman Medal for Excellence in Architectural Acoustics (2014) added by the Acoustical Society of America