Jan van Schaik

Jan van Schaik is a practitioner academic. His teaching, research, and PhD supervision draws on long term, and current, experience in the professions of architecture, art, and creative sector policy and strategy consulting.

He  is a Melbourne-based artist and architect whose work fuses cultural insight with architectural invention. He is the director of MvS Architects, design director at strategy consultancy Future Tense, founder of the performance series +Concepts, and a senior lecturer at RMIT Architecture & Urban Design.

For over two decades, Jan has designed award-winning buildings — public, residential, educational — and led research projects that push at the edges of architectural thinking. His work, whether a masterplan, a gallery installation, or a house in a remote ecological zone, is grounded in a single pursuit: how space shapes culture — and how culture, in turn, reshapes space.

Through Future Tense, Jan works at the intersection of strategy, design, and cultural policy, developing bold, actionable frameworks for creative and governmental organisations. In 2018, he launched Creative Ecologies, a nationwide effort to seed, support, and scale Australia’s creative communities.

He is the mind behind Lost Tablets, an ongoing artwork series that fuses Lego bricks with the symbolic language of architecture, exposing the uncanny space between childhood memory and existential inquiry. The works have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Melbourne Design Week, and the Quarantine Art Fair.

Across all his roles — designer, educator, strategist, artist — Jan van Schaik is building the conditions for creative risk-taking, cultural momentum, and architectural meaning-making.