Space Syntax: Selected Papers by Bill Hillier, eds. Laura Vaughan, John Peponis and Ruth Dalton – UCL Press, April 2025 (print and open access)

Professor Bill Hillier spent most of his career at The Bartlett, University College London, where he founded and developed, with a team of colleagues, an original research programme that set the study of architecture on a firm scientific basis. His transformational way of thinking about buildings and cities influenced generations of scholars, researchers and practitioners within the built environment disciplines and way beyond – in fields ranging from archaeology and biology to physics and zoology.

Space Syntax: Selected papers by Bill Hillier provides a canon of works that reflects the progression of Hillier’s ideas from the early publications of the 1970s to his most recent work, published before his death in 2019. This selection of influential works ranges from his papers on architecture as a professional and research discipline, through to his later papers that present a theory of the spatial structure of the city and its social functions. By bringing together writing from across his career-span of half a century, with specially commissioned introductions by a wide range of international experts in the field, we are able to contextualise and show the range and evolution of Hillier’s key ideas.