Cambridge top architect Francois Penz relocates to China from UK

Francois Penz, former architecture department head at the University of Cambridge, has joined Nanjing University on a full-time basis.

Photo: Handout Francois Penz, former head of the department of architecture at the University of Cambridge and a pioneer in the interdisciplinary field of architecture and film, has joined Nanjing University on a full-time basis.

The school of architecture and urban planning of Nanjing University announced the appointment on its social media account on March 17.

Penz is an emeritus professor at the university, a former director of The Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies, a fellow of Darwin College and director of the Design, Visualisation and Communication Digital Laboratory.

He was selected for China’s National Leading Talent Programme in 2025, having already collaborated with Nanjing University for many years before joining full-time.

Born in France in 1953, Francois Penz studied architecture at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland in the early 1970s.

Before arriving, his knowledge of Cambridge was limited to its rowing rivalry with Oxford.

He spent the next 45 years at this university.

He was among the first scholars to integrate computer science with architecture – a focus that shaped his doctoral research.

In a 2020 interview with Cambridge University, he recalled his student days: “At the end of the 70s and early 80s, there was only one mainframe, on the New Museums site.

Because the computer centre was busy during the day, the best time to work was at night.” He earned his doctorate in architecture in 1983 and continued postdoctoral research at Cambridge, joining the architecture department as a faculty member in 1988.

He was among the first to introduce Apple computers to Cambridge, conducting exploratory research and publishing the book Computers in Architecture.

In 1991, he established a new research direction: architecture and film.

He launched the first undergraduate workshop, Architecture in Motion, in Cambridge’s architecture department, exploring how moving images could express architectural space and time – a first step towards interdisciplinary collaboration.

He is widely regarded as the first scholar to treat film and architecture as a serious academic discipline.

He uses an academic approach to show that films are not merely visually appealing – they also offer valuable insights into houses and cities.

A film, he argues, authentically reflects the archi

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