Emmett Scanlon is an architect focused on the social purpose of architecture. His practice includes the design of buildings, academic research, architectural education, arts and built environment policy development, curation and exhibition design and criticism.

Since 2014, Emmett has been principal at Emmett Scanlon Studio. Prior to this, he was co-director of CAST architecture and Project Director in Grafton Architects, where he worked from 1998-2006. 

Emmett has been Principal Investigator on a number of nationally funded research projects including a national study on the state of architectural research in Ireland the first national survey on awareness of and participation in architecture in Ireland.

Emmett is a graduate of the School of Architecture, University College Dublin and a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sheffield. In this research he is proposing a new way to consider the house in the context of Irish architectural culture and wider society. Emmett has been exploring aspects of this research in practice-based projects such as Nine Lives and Home on the Grange.

Emmett was appointed Assistant Professor in Architecture in 2006 at University College Dublin. He coordinates the MArch Part II program at UCD Architecture and in 2016 co-founded #risinghome, a design and research program on housing for Master of Architecture students.

Emmett has also taught at the University of Ulster and was an External Examiner at University of Limerick from 2014-2017. He has been a visiting critic at Dublin Institute of Technology, Cork Centre for Architectural Education, University of Limerick, Queens University Belfast, Sheffield School of Architecture and Hochschule, Lucerne, Switzerland

Emmett is Irish correspondent for A10 the journal of New European Architecture and has written for architectural journals in Ireland, the UK and across Europe. In 2017 Emmett initiated Occupational Hazards  a continuous written and visual project on the design and use of architecture.

Emmett is currently Architecture Adviser to the Arts Council (Ireland), a position he has retained via open competition since 2006. During that time Emmett has been key in the development of new and innovative projects and research in public awareness of architecture and the development of socially engaged architectural practice in Ireland.

In 2015 Emmett was selected to represent Ireland as part of New Horizon Architecture from Ireland, the flagship architecture project of Irish Design 2015.

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Portrait by Matthew Thompson, Kilkenny 2015.