All Else Is Gooky

… is a blog written by Stephen Parnell, an architect and teacher, writer, communicator, critic, and accidental historian of architecture. Professionally, at Newcastle University, I research architecture magazines (especially AD – the image above are the covers of the magazines I researched for my PhD, completed in 2012 at Sheffield University under the supervision of the late Peter Blundell Jones) and postwar British architecture history (especially Brutalism). I also still write the occasional piece for the architectural press, such as the Architectural Review.

I am currently writing Concrete for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series (due 2025), a book on Theo Crosby for Lund Humphries (due 2024), and a book on AD magazine for Harvard Design Press (due 2024).

However, this is a personal blog where I intend to write less formally about various interests in architecture, academia, media, writing, making, computational drawing, along with some biographical reflections on things like mental health and living with Asperger’s – essentially a long form of my Twitter feed of the same name.

*‘All Else Is Gooky’ is a throwaway phrase that Alison and Peter Smithson used at the end of a proposed editorial for AD magazine in 1965. I will write about it here sometime.