Dr Johnathan Djabarouti, Senior Lecturer at MSA, has been awarded new grants from the British Academy and the RIBA Research Fund to support research into built heritage, place, and intangible cultural practices.
The first project, Mapping Intangible Heritage, is funded by a British Academy Talent Development Award. It aims to develop new spatial and cartographic approaches for understanding cultural heritage, with a particular focus on how skills, knowledge, and social relationships operate within historic environments.
The research brings spatial social network analysis and GIS based mapping methods into dialogue with architectural and heritage research. Rather than treating mapping as a purely descriptive tool, the project develops interpretive and relational approaches that reveal patterns of connection, clustering, and movement within cultural networks.
These methods will inform a pilot study focused on craft and cultural networks, where understanding how skills and practices are distributed across space is central to questions of resilience, sustainability, and climate adaptation. Mapping is used here to support deeper conversations about continuity, vulnerability, and change within historic environments.
The second project, Designing with the Intangible: Design Methods for Contemporary Architectural Heritage Practice, is funded by the RIBA Research Fund and adopts a practice based research approach. It explores new ways for architectural practice to engage with cultural heritage beyond the material fabric of historic buildings.
The project addresses a growing challenge within heritage practice: how architects recognise, interpret, and work with intangible cultural heritage, including memory, craft, ritual, and lived experience, when designing with historic places. While expectations around intangible heritage have increased following the UK’s ratification of UNESCO’s convention, there remains little shared guidance on how these cultural dimensions can be meaningfully embedded within everyday architectural workflows.
Using the RIBA Plan of Work as a shared professional framework, the research examines how intangible heritage is encountered across the life of a project. It focuses on points where cultural intent is most likely to be diluted or lost, with findings directly informing the development of practical, practice oriented outputs.
Both projects sit within MSA’s Built Heritage Research Group, co led by Dr Johnathan Djabarouti and Dr Ray Lucas, and reflect the School’s wider commitment to research that connects heritage, design, and contemporary architectural practice. Further information about the group’s work can be found at
https://www.msa.ac.uk/research/built-heritage