(Ra)dical (Re)alims
Design Research Lab
Robert Schmidt III
Founder
BArch, MEng, PhD
Dr Robert Schmidt III, is a Professor of Architectural Design at Loughborough University in the UK where he was the Head of Architecture (2020-2024), leading the development of architecture (BArch & MArch) and currently leads the Adaptable Futures Research Group.
He has practiced architecture for prestigious and award-winning architectural firms in the USA, including Herb Beckhard and Frank Richlan (HB+FR) and OPN Architects. As an architectural designer, he has extensive experience co-designing community centres in New York and other public institutions (museums & libraries).
Rob's research includes adaptability, transdisciplinary design, circularity and material intelligence. He is regularly an invited speaker at design and academic events around the world and has published several books and papers along his research interests. Rob received a bachelor's degree in architecture from Iowa State University (USA); a MEng degree from The University of Tokyo (Japan); and a PhD from Loughborough University (UK).
Cagri Sanliturk
Founder
BArch, MEng, PhD
Dr Cagri Sanliturk is a Lecturer in Architecture at Loughborough University. He is co-lead of the RaRe design lab, where his work centres on reimagining architecture as a social and political practice one that is shaped by affect, and everyday spatial practices. His work explores architecture’s emotional and social dimensions through participatory design, affect theory, and the politics of space, with a focus on co-creation and lived experience.
He co-led the Evocative Architecture Summer School with Heatherwick Studio, where students and local residents reimagined façades through sensory and emotional engagement. He also developed the Doncaster Toolkit, a multi-platform resource created with local youth through walks, workshops, and collaborative play to explore and redesign their town.
Cagri completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield, a school rooted in socially engaged design, and previously taught at Manchester School of Architecture.
He co-led the Evocative Architecture Summer School with Heatherwick Studio, where students and local residents reimagined façades through sensory and emotional engagement. He also developed the Doncaster Toolkit, a multi-platform resource created with local youth through walks, workshops, and collaborative play to explore and redesign their town.
Cagri completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield, a school rooted in socially engaged design, and previously taught at Manchester School of Architecture.
Zhenzhen Yu
Doctoral Researcher
BA, MA
Zhenzhen Yu is a Doctoral Researcher in the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering, Loughborough University. Her doctoral research examines the adaptive reuse of industrial heritage buildings through a comparative study of the UK and China, with a particular focus on how spatial transformation, social narrative, and economic governance intersect to reconstruct heritage value across different institutional contexts.
Her broader interests include adaptive reuse theory, heritage conservation, urban regeneration, sustainable housing, and circular economy in the built environment. She has presented her research at international conferences in India and Canada, and has published in peer-reviewed journals covering heritage studies, urban planning, and built environment policy and governance. Her work seeks to advance a relational understanding of heritage value, contributing to debates on how adaptive reuse can be mobilised as a tool for more equitable and sustainable urban futures.
Shuhua Ye
Doctoral Researcher
BA, MA
Shuhua Ye is a Doctoral Researcher in the School of Architecture, Building and Civil Engineering at Loughborough University. Her research, Inhuman Micro-ecologies in Urban Fallows, reads abandoned edges of the capitalist city, ruderal vegetation, and material weathering as sites where inhuman processes resist accelerated redevelopment. Working across ecological aesthetics, critical urban theory, and architecture, her research develops three original concepts, accelerated inhuman labour, suspended state decision, and compressed temporalities, alongside a three-layer evaluative lens (Interface, Legibility, Stewardship) for reading how residual sites hold against erasure.
Her work extends from an MA at University of the Arts London, where she studied war-damaged and memorial architecture, through several years as a project designer at leading design firms in China on adaptive reuse projects, into doctoral research that carries the same concern into an ecological register.