John is Senior Lecturer in Architectural Design at Cork Centre for Architectural Education in University College Cork where he leads the four-year undergraduate architecture programme, as well as design-based research projects. His academic research draws on his wide experience of architectural practice and includes written and design-based outputs, such as books, conference papers, and exhibitions. He has previously taught in Queens University Belfast and University College Dublin, and has been a visiting critic in Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Oxford Brookes University, University College Dublin, and Politecnico di Milano. He was external examiner at Cardiff University and Queens University Belfast.

He has participated in many international biennales and triennales, and his work has been exhibited in Copenhagen, Cork, Dublin, Galway, Lisbon, Milan, New York, and Venice.  In 2012 he was appointed by Culture Ireland and the Arts Council to curate Ireland's Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition, titled "Shifting Ground" looked at the cultural implications of globalisation for Irish Architecture. In 2014 he was reappointed to co-commission/curate/design Ireland's Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibition titled "Infra-Eireann" looked at the social and material development of the Irish state through infrastructures. In 2015 he was appointed by Irish Year of Design 2015 to design a pavilion for the Salone di Mobile in Milan. He has also designed a number of exhibitions for the National Archives displayed at the United Nations in Geneva and New York.

He is the founder of John McLaughlin Architects - an award-winning architecture and urban design practice that has been recognised for developing new ways of practicing architecture. The practice's work ranges across bridges, conservation, educational buildings, landscapes, masterplans, museums, private houses and public spaces.

His academic research bridges theory and practice through a Latourian approach to architecture in the making that links architectural practice to social construction. He has traced these connections through a number of exhibitions and publications linking modern architecture and technology to the ongoing reconstruction of Irish identity since independence. In 2015 he published a book of the research that he undertook for Venice titled 'Infrastructure and the Architectures of Modernity in Ireland 1916-2016' in collaboration with Gary A. Boyd. He has written about these subjects in a number of books and in papers published in Arena Journal of Architectural Research and Architectural Research Quarterly. His Ph.D was the first ever Ph.D. by prior publication completed in the School of Engineering and Architecture and was on the subject of the exhibition as a site of discourse formation in architecture. It theorised the exhibition as a form of publication proper to the discipline of architecture producing spatially distributed discourse.