Martha Read is a qualified architect with experience on residential, commercial and cultural projects in the United Kingdom, the USA and Abu Dhabi. She has recently worked at Gustafson Porter in London, and at Gehry Partners in Los Angeles, where she was involved in projects ranging from hotel design for the Grand Avenue development in Los Angeles to furniture for the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. Other experience includes spells at Eric Owen Moss Architects in Los Angeles; Fisher Friedman in San Francisco; and at Chassay+Last and Maybank & Matthews Architects in London. She has also worked independently on residential projects in Los Angeles and Laguna Beach. Her work is a collaboration with clients to arrive at carefully tailored, creative responses to specific limitations of brief, budget, site and context.

In Los Angeles (2003-2009), Martha Read was a board member of the LA Forum for Architecture, and taught Cultural Studies at SCI-Arc. Her classes explored differences and similarities in Modernism in various disciplines, and looked at how literary ideas might be applied to architectural production and criticism. She also worked as an editor on SCI-Arc Press publications including Office dA/Andrew Zago: Two Installations and Paffard Keatinge-Clay: Modern Architect(ure), Modern Master(s). Her work and research has been shown at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles, the Barcelona Center for Contemporary Culture (CCCB), and the Casa de Cultura in Buenos Aires. In 2009, she was part of the LA Forum’s Femmes Fatales lecture series.

Before training in Architecture at Kingston School of Art and the University of Westminster, Martha Read received a Masters in French and German Literature from Oxford University. She then worked as a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, for which she still contributes articles, mostly on architecture. She has also written for Building Design, the New Statesman, the Evening Standard, and Volume magazine, and for the Honor Fraser Gallery in Los Angeles.