Professor Edward Hollis
Job Title
Professor of Interior Design
Profile
Working with follies and ruins in Sri Lanka, with modern interventions to historic buildings in Scotland, and in the notoriously slippery discipline of Interiors, has focussed Hollis' research and theoretical thinking on building stories and narrative structures connecting time, folk tale, and the built environment.
His first book, ‘The Secret Lives of Buildings’: a collection of folk tales stories about mythical buildings was published in 2009; and his second ‘The Memory Palace: a book of lost Interiors’ was published in 2013. His third book, ‘How to Make a Home’ was published for the School of Life in 2016. His fourth ‘A Drama in Time’ is a guide to Riddles Court, the oldest house in Edinburgh.
His work also engages with heritage activitism. Between 2012-18 Ed was involved with experimental plans to re-occupy the ruins of Gillespie Kidd and Coia’s modernist seminary at Cardross in Argyll. He is a member of the educational advisory board of the Scottish Historic Buildings Trust. Since 2018 he has been working with the inhabitants of Asansol, a coal-mining town in West Bengal, India, to find innovative ways to celebrate their industrial heritage through storytelling and study. And since 2021 he has been working with the community activist at the Granton:Hub and Una Europa partners on international research projects relating to cultural heritage on the urban periphery.