Dr Seán Cullen is a Lecturer in the School of Natural and Built Environment at Queen’s University Belfast. His research focuses on how architecture and urbanism respond to the challenge of climate change. The future requires new, creative and projective possibilities for how citizens live, work and play. Architecture presents the opportunity to unlock the complex flows of the city. 

He has previously worked on large, design-led research projects, including Movable-Nexus (M-NEX), funded by the Belmont Forum, and Ideal Home: the net-zero poultry house of the future, funded by Innovate UK.

M-NEX explored how cities can be designed for sustainable use of food, water and energy resources in the context of our changing climate. The project studied cities in new boundary conditions of change - Amsterdam, Belfast, Detroit, Doha, Tokyo and Sydney. Each presents differing socio-economic, cultural and political contexts for addressing how the built environment can evolve to produce effective spaces and resource use for residents. The project develops propositions for each city and region through design-based practice and undertaken through a series of international workshops.

Ideal Home, proposed three new, radical poultry houses of the future in order to meet new net-zero ambitions while improving animal welfare, embedding circularity in the construction and resource management of the house. 

Seán coordinates Stage 2 in the undergradute (BSc) architecture programme and Technology Dissertation in the masters (MArch) programme. He also teaching on the MSc Future Urbanism programme. 

He has previously run a studio unit called Architettura Superleggera [ASL] with Professor Greg Keeffe. ASL explored the relationship between architecture and the complex flows of globalization versus the stasis of traditional ideas of place. The future is effective: speedy, stripped-down and super-light. In 2019-20, students studied the low-density landscapes of the Lake District and Groningen, north-east Netherlands.