Susanne Schindler

Design Critic in Urban Planning and Design

Susanne Schindler is an architect and historian interested in the mutual construction of architecture, finance, and regulation in housing. She uses history to understand the present and connects varied sources across national boundaries to challenge the assumptions that shape how we envision the future of living together. Schindler holds a professional degree in architecture from Berlin University of the Arts and a PhD in architectural history from ETH Zurich.

Since 2109, Schindler has been senior lecturer and co-director of the MAS Program in the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich. She has taught urbanism and design at MIT, GSAPP, The New School, and RWTH Aachen.

Schindler is dedicated to public scholarship and writes regularly for a range of publications, including Urban Omnibus, Places, and Platform. From 2010 to 2015, she was a founding editor of the peer-reviewed, open-access Candide—Journal for Architectural Knowledge.

Her most recent research and exhibition project is Cooperative Conditions: A Primer on Architecture, Finance and Regulation in Zurich (with Anne Kockelkorn and MAS GTA students) which was exhibited at the 2021 Biennale di Architettura in Venice. A book of the same name is forthcoming from gta Verlag. From 2013 to 2016, Schindler was lead researcher and co-curator of House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate at Columbia University’s Buell Center, and co-editor with Reinhold Martin and Jacob Moore of the book The Art of Inequality. In 2012 and 2013, she was part of the interdisciplinary design collaborative Team R8 and developed “The City as Living Room” as part of CHPC/The Architectural League’s Making Room initiative.