For 11 years, from 1996, John McKean was Professor of Architecture at the then University of Brighton Faculty of Arts and Architecture.

He was an architectural journalist and editor who exhibited and published drawings and won competitions as a photographer. He studied architectural history and theory under Joseph Rykwert and Dalibor Vesely and for some years ran the History and Theory unit at University of North London (now London Met).

As a researcher, McKean was insatiably curious about the built environment and how we inhabit it. While this enabled him to avoid being pigeon-holed, it has not restricted him looking deeply and precisely at the architecture of widely diverse times and places. His portfolio of publications was thus quite unusually varied and published work across this range attracted both research awards at early stages and accolades on publication.

While at the University of Brighton an AHRB study leave award funded the basic research for the project which resulted in Layered Places: Giancarlo De Carlo (Giancarlo De Carlo: Des Lieux, Des Hommes), 2004, the first book on De Carlo for a decade, and the first to include the full range of his architectural work, named Book of the Year for The Architects’ Journal.. With this background, McKean was invited to produce a completely new text and approach to the magisterial 'Banister Fletcher’s History of Architecture'.

McKean helped shape and appeared on camera on Channel 4’s programme centred on The Crystal Palace (in their The Shock of the New series), similarly, he was consulted and appeared on BBC2’s long programme on the Royal Festival Hall (reused, edited rather differently, and broadcast on BBC4). And was also on camera in 2007 in BBC4’s 90 minute film on Daniel Libeskind.

McKean has lectured widely in Europe (particularly Scandinavia and Italy) and in Singapore. He has twice addressed The 20th Century Society and the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society and gave a paper on the Crystal Palace at an Institution of Civil Engineers’ international conference on Glass and Iron in 2001. He addressed DOCOMOMO in December 2007 and The 20th Century Society in 2008.