Alex Krieger
Alex Krieger, FAIA, has combined a career of teaching and practice, dedicating himself in both to understanding how to improve the quality of place and life in our major urban areas.
Mr. Krieger is Professor in Practice of Urban Design, Emeritus at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he has taught since 1977. He served as Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design (1998-2004, 2006-2007, 2019-2020), Director of the Urban Design Program (1990-2001), and as Associate Chair of the Department of Architecture (1984-1989). In addition to design studios and seminar courses at the GSD, he taught a General Education course on the evolution of American cities at Harvard College. In 2017, he was named one of the Fifteen Professor of the Year by the Harvard Crimson.
Mr. Krieger is also a principal at NBBJ, a global design practice. He was founding principal of Chan Krieger Sieniewicz until their merger with NBBJ in 2009. Since 1984, he has provided architecture, urban design, and urban planning services to a broad array of clients in numerous cities worldwide, focusing primarily on educational, institutional, healthcare, and public projects in complex urban settings.
In addition to serving on university-wide committees to improve Harvard’s main campus and their expansion in Allston, Mr. Krieger has also served as: member of the United States Commission of Fine Arts (2012-present); member of the Riley Institute (2000-present); founder of the Big City Planning Directors Institute (1999-present); director of the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (1994-1999); member of the New England Holocaust Memorial Committee (1989-2000); and member of the Boston Civic Design Commission (1989-1997). He is also a board member for the Boston Public Library’s Norman B. Leventhal Map and Education Center and for Historic Boston.
Mr. Krieger received a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University and a Master of City Planning in Urban Design from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Major publications include: City on a Hill: Urban Idealism in America from the Puritans to the Present (Harvard University Press, 2019); Urban Design (with William Saunders, University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Remaking the Urban Waterfront (with Bonnie Fisher et al., Urban Land Institute, 2004); Mapping Boston (with David Cobb and Amy Turner, MIT Press, 1999); Towns and Town-Making Principles (with Andrés Duany et al., Rizzoli, 1991); and A Design Primer for Cities and Towns (with Anne Mackin, Massachusetts Council on the Arts and Humanities, 1989).
Remment Koolhaas
Rem Koolhaas, Professor in Practice of Architecture and Urban Design, founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975 together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. Having worked as a journalist and script writer before becoming an architect, Koolhaas graduated from the Architectural Association in London, and in 1978, published Delirious New York, a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In 1995, his book S,M,L,XL summarized the work of OMA and established connections between contemporary society and architecture. At this moment Rem Koolhaas is heading the work of OMA as well as AMO – the conceptual branch of OMA, a think tank focused on social, economic, and technological issues.
At Harvard, Rem Koolhaas conducts the Project on the City, a research program investigating changing urban conditions around the world. The projects include a study on China’s Pearl River Delta (published as Great Leap Forward), an analysis of the role of retail and consumption in the contemporary society (The Harvard Guide to Shopping), and studies on Rome, Lagos, Moscow and Beijing.
Recently, OMA has completed the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin, a campus center at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, the Prada Epicenter in Los Angeles and the Public Library in Seattle. The Seattle Library was chosen by TIME magazine as The Best Architecture for 2004 and was described by the New York Times as “a blazing chandelier to swing your dreams upon. If an American city can erect a civic project as brave as this one, the sun hasn’t set on the West.” (May 16, 2004)
In April 2005, the Casa da Musica concert hall in Porto was completed and was already voted as one of the most important concert halls in the world by the New York Times (April 10th 2005). In Asia, work has begun on CCTV — a 575,000m2 headquarters, studio, and cultural center for China’s national broadcaster, China Central Television, in Beijing. CCTV is OMA’s largest building to date, and is to be completed by 2008, in time for the Beijing Olympic Games.
Recent AMO projects include a study for the European Commission on the visual identity of the EU, image restructuring for Condé Nast magazines Lucky and Wired, a study on the future of the automobile for Volkswagen, and a study concerning preservation for the city of Beijing. By combining AMO and OMA Rem Koolhaas is seen as one of the most important thinkers of the last decades. Nicolai Ouroussoff, critic for Los Angeles Times, underlines this by: “There is little question that Rem Koolhaas is one of the most influential architects of the last 20 years. As an architectural thinker, his cool analytic approach to design, sprinkled with a healthy skepticism, has informed the profession that his fingerprints can be found on the work of almost any young architect today. Koolhaas has achieved the enviable stature of both cult idol and international celebrity.” (May 21, 2004)
The work of Rem Koolhaas and OMA has been celebrated as well by several international awards, including the Pritzker Architecture Prize (2000) and the RIBA Gold Medal (2004). In 2005, Rem Koolhaas received the Mies van der Rohe Award for the Netherlands Embassy, Berlin. This award is presented every two years by the European Union and the Fundaci Mies van der Rohe (Barcelona) to acknowledge and reward quality architectural production in Europe. The jury singled out OMA’s design of the Netherlands Embassy in Berlin for the extraordinary relationship established with its surroundings. In making their decision to award the Netherlands Embassy, the jury commended the “quality of the urban reflection and intelligence of the concept implemented, especially as regards the unprecedented concept of ‘trajectory’ and the new potential it brings to this project of great complexity.”
Koolhaas’ work was the subject of an overview exhibition, Content, which opened at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin in 2003, and at the Kunsthal (built by OMA) in 2004. In conjunction with the exhibition, a book of the same name was published in 2003 by Taschen Books. Content illustrates the ways that Rem Koolhaas and OMA-AMO interact with the world and how the world in turn influences their work. An exhibition by AMO on representation in and the perception of Europe was on display last Fall in Brussels and at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. In Summer 2005, Rem Koolhaas curated one of the exhibitions titled Expansion & Neglect for the prestigious Biennale in Venice.
See projects at oma.eu
Rem Koolhaas recipient of the 15th Praemium Imperiale
Remment Koolhaas named the Pritzker Architecture Prize Laureate
K. Michael Hays
Michael Hays is Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Co-Director of the Master in Design Studies program. Hays joined the Faculty of Design in 1988, teaching courses in architectural history and theory.
Hays has played a central role in the development of the field of architectural theory and his work is internationally known. His research and scholarship have focused on the areas of European modernism and critical theory as well as on theoretical issues in contemporary architectural practice. He has published on the work of modern architects such as Hannes Meyer, Ludwig Hilberseimer, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as on contemporary figures such as Peter Eisenman, Bernard Tschumi, and the late John Hejduk. Hays was the founder of the scholarly journal Assemblage, which was a leading forum of discussion of architectural theory in North America and Europe. From 1995 to 2005 he was Chair of the PhD Committee and Director of the GSD’s Advanced Independent Study Programs. In 2000 he was appointed the first Adjunct Curator of Architecture at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a position he held until 2009.
Hays received the Bachelor of Architecture degree from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1976. From MIT he received the Master of Architecture degree in Advanced Studies in 1979, and the Doctor of Philosophy in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art in 1990.
Edward Eigen
Edward A. Eigen is Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. A historian of the long nineteenth century, in the European and Anglo-American contexts, his research and teaching focus on relationships in and between humanistic and scholarly traditions and the natural sciences and allied practices of knowledge production. With a background in art history, a professional training in design, and a doctorate in the history and theory of architecture from MIT, he is at home with and seeks to productively defamiliarize images, texts, and topographies of intricate description. A proponent of the Montaignian essay tradition, his writings, while ultimately grounded in the uncertain terrain of “landscape,” have ranged from questions of botanical and zoological systematics, the creation and loss of great and not so great museums and libraries, the history of the weather, and acts of plagiarism in the founding documents of architecture theory. All of these studies engage in questions of historical narrative and the species of evidence upon which it depends and/or invents along the way.
Eigen was an assistant professor at the Princeton University School of Architecture, where he was an Old Dominion Faculty Fellow, and the recipient of a university-wide graduate mentoring award, and the David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant for his research on architectural machines. His article on the prestidigitator Robert-Houdin’s invention of the doorbell will appear as “Controlling: Comfort in the Modern Home,” in Architecture and Technics: A Theoretical Field Guide to Practice. At the GSD, Eigen co-organized the colloquium “Claiming Landscape as Architecture,” which appeared as a special issue of Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, of which he is an Associate Editor. His recent book, On Accident: Episodes in Architecture and Landscape (MIT Press), seeks to reclaim and provide forms of interpretability for unfamiliar incidents and artifacts that fall outside the canon. His current monograph project, Beyond the Rose Garden, examines real and emblematic landscapes and architectures associated with the administrations of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Ford, including the “grassy knoll,” the Highway Beautification Act, Watergate, and the Bicentennial Time Capsule.
Sonja Dümpelmann
Sonja Dümpelmann is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD) where she teaches history and theory courses. She was previously an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland (2007-2012), and Auburn University (2005-2007) where she taught design studios and history and theory classes. She holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture from the University of the Arts, Berlin, and an MLA from Leibniz Universität Hannover. Dümpelmann has curated exhibitions on landscape history in Germany, and has worked as a landscape designer in Studio Paolo Bürgi, Switzerland. She has held research fellowships at the German Historical Institute, and at Dumbarton Oaks, Washington DC.
Dümpelmann has lectured internationally and she was appointed 2015 August-Wilhelm Scheer Visiting Professor at the Technical University Munich. Her research and writing focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century landscape history, and contemporary landscape architecture in the Western world, with a particular focus on the urban environment in Germany, Italy, and the United States. Her work explores the transatlantic transfer of ideas, the role of politics, technology and science, and the work of women in the field.
Dümpelmann is the author of Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (Yale University Press, 2019), Flights of Imagination: Aviation, Landscape, Design (University of Virginia Press, 2014; 2015 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Book Prize), and of a book on the Italian landscape architect Maria Teresa Parpagliolo Shephard (VDG Weimar, 2004). Her edited volumes include Airport Landscape: Urban Ecologies in the Aerial Age (together with Charles Waldheim; Harvard GSD, 2016), Women, Modernity and Landscape Architecture (together with John Beardsley; Routledge, 2015), A Cultural History of Gardens in the Age of Empire (Bloomsbury, 2013), Greening the City: Urban Landscapes in the Twentieth Century (together with Dorothee Brantz; University of Virginia Press, 2011), and Pückler and America (German Historical Institute Washington DC, 2007). Dümpelmann has published articles in Landscape Journal, Landscape Research, Planning Perspectives, Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes, Stadtbauwelt, Stadt und Grün, Die Gartenkunst, Journal of Landscape Architecture, and others. Her work has been supported by grants from the Graham Foundation, and the Foundation for Landscape Studies.
Dümpelmann serves as Senior Fellow of Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington D.C., and is the past President of the Landscape History Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (2013-16). At the GSD, she has served as area head of the History and Philosophy of Design track of the Master in Design Studies program.
Gareth Doherty
Dr. Gareth Doherty ASLA takes a human-centered approach to design and theory that aspires to shape environmentally and socially just landscapes. Doherty contributes to core knowledge in landscape architecture through applying ethnographic fieldwork and participatory design methodologies to design and theory. This work critically reassesses 20th-century approaches to the observed landscape to advance new pedagogy, tools, and techniques that address contemporary design issues of equity, identity, cultural space, and the human impacts of climate change. Through what he terms “landscape fieldwork,” Doherty unravels diverse landscape narratives that have not yet been formally documented as evidenced through his books, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State (University of California Press, 2017), Landscape Fieldwork: How Engaging the World Can Change Design (University of Virginia Press, 2025); and his recent fieldwork on African landscape architecture.
Doherty bases his work on two questions. First, how can landscape architecture theory, education, and practice benefit from working with societies with no formal landscape architecture discipline? Second, how does comparing landscapes of diverse societies better inform landscape architects’ sensitivity to the values that shape others’ attitudes towards the landscapes they dwell in and make? Doherty addresses these questions through research on designed landscapes across the postcolonial and Islamic worlds, primarily in the Arabian Peninsula, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the African continent.
In Doherty’s book, Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State , he analyzed a Bahraini category for landscape—greenery—al-khudra in Arabic. He spent a year walking through Bahrain, learning local language, talking with people, and recording his encounters with green, as color and as an environmental movement. The paradox at the heart of the book is that the manifestation of the color green in arid urban environments is often in direct conflict with the practice of green from an environmental point of view. Explicit in the book is the argument that concepts of color and object are mutually defining, and thus a discussion about green becomes a discussion about the creation of space and place. The Spanish translation, Paradojas de lo Verde: Paisajes de una ciudad-Estado , was published by Puente Editores.
Doherty’s edited books include Landscape is…! Essays on the Meaning of Landscape (Routledge, forthcoming) a sequel to Is Landscape…? Essays on the Identity of Landscape , edited with Charles Waldheim (Routledge, 2015, and China Architecture and Building Press, 2019). Doherty is editor of Roberto Burle Marx Lectures: Landscape as Art and Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers, 2018, revised 2020). Doherty is a founding editor of the New Geographies journal and editor-in-chief of New Geographies 3: Urbanisms of Color (2011). Doherty edited Ecological Urbanism (Lars Müller Publishers, 2010, revised 2016) with Mohsen Mostafavi, which has been translated in several languages. Doherty has published in journals such as Built Environment, Harvard Design Magazine, Kerb, Topos, and Studies in the History of Gardens and Designed Landscapes.
Doherty received the Doctor of Design degree from Harvard GSD and his Master of Landscape Architecture and Certificate in Urban Design from the University of Pennsylvania. He earned masters and undergraduate degrees from University College Dublin. He has several built landscape architectural projects, and is a member of professional associations in Nigeria, the United States, and the United Kingdom.
In Fall 2024, Doherty co-taught Theories of Landscape as Urbanism with Charles Waldheim (DES-3241); and offered the Proseminar in Landscape Architecture for Master in Landscape Architecture II students (ADV-9641). In Spring 2025, Doherty taught African Landscape Architecture: Alternative Futures for the Field (DES-3514 and AFRAMER 143Y) cross-listed between the Department of Landscape Architecture and the Department of African and African American Studies.
Diane Davis
Diane E. Davis is the Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism and former Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design (GSD). She also is the director of the Mexican Cities Initiative at the GSD, and faculty chair of the committee on Mexico at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard. Before moving to Harvard in 2012, Davis served as the head of the International Development Group in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, where she also was Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning. Trained as a sociologist with an interest in cities in Latin America (BA in Geography, Northwestern University; Ph.D. in sociology, UCLA) Davis’s research interests include the relations between urbanization and national development, urban governance, urban social movements, and informality, with a special emphasis on Mexico.
Books include Cities and Sovereignty: Identity Conflicts in the Urban Realm (Indiana University Press, 2011); Discipline and Development: Middle Classes and Prosperity in East Asia and Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2004); Irregular Armed Forces and their Role in Politics and State Formation (Cambridge University Press, 2003); and Urban Leviathan: Mexico City in the Twentieth Century (Temple University Press 1994; Spanish translation 1999). Her recent research has focused on urban violence as well as spatial strategies to minimize risk and foster resilience in the face of these and other vulnerabilities.
She teaches classes on Urbanization and Development; Urban Governance and the Politics of Planning, SDGs in Theory and Practice; and Planning Theory and Praxis: Comparative and Historical Approaches. This April Davis was named a CIFAR Fellow and co-director (along with Simon Goldhill, Secretary of the British Academy and professor of History at Cambridge) of a five-year project titled “Humanity’s Urban Future.” With a focus on six cities around the world (Kolkata, Mexico City, Shanghai, Kinshasa, Naples, Toronto), and with the participation of historians, planners, anthropologists, geographers, and architects, this initiative interrogates how a `good urban life’ is conceptualized and produced.
Faculty Coordinator, Mexican Cities Initiative
Co-Chair, Faculty Committee on Mexico, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies
Executive Committee Member, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs
Advisory Board Member, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative
CIFAR Fellow and Project Co-Director, 2023-2028, “Humanity’s Urban Future”
Faculty Affiliate, Bloomberg Center for Cities, Harvard University
Danielle Choi
Danielle Narae Choi is an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a licensed landscape architect. Her research examines landscape design as a cultural practice that synthesizes broader concerns of science, technology, and infrastructure.
Choi’s current research is an environmental study of 20th-century interior landscapes. A subset of public projects were volatile sites of negotiation between plant vitality and human comfort; colonial botany and situated traditional knowledge; new aesthetic agendas and entrenched urban crisis. Ongoing research investigates infrastructural breaches of continental divides in North America and their implications for the concept of genius loci in landscape architecture.
Choi’s writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Landscape Architecture Magazine, and in the volume Fresh Water, edited by Mary Pat McGuire and Jessica Henson. A forthcoming essay, Landscape is. . . Labor will appear in the volume Landscape Is. . .!, edited by Gareth Doherty and Charles Waldheim.
Before her appointment at the GSD, Choi practiced professionally with Topotek in Berlin and Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates (MVVA) in New York. As a senior associate at MVVA, she led the strategy and design of complex projects ranging in scale from gardens to parks to urban framework plans, leading large, multi-disciplinary teams. Choi draws upon this experience to examine the realms of knowledge, social relations, and labor required to produce (and that are produced by) living landscapes.
Choi holds a degree in art history from the University of Chicago and a Master in Landscape Architecture degree from the GSD, where she received the Jacob Weidenman award for excellence in design.
Neil Brenner
on leave 2019-20
Neil Brenner is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). His writing and teaching focus on the theoretical, conceptual and methodological dimensions of urban questions. His work builds upon, and seeks to extend, the fields of critical urban and regional studies, comparative geopolitical economy and critical sociospatial theory. Major research foci include processes of urban and regional restructuring and uneven spatial development; planetary urbanization; cities and hinterlands in geohistorical and world-ecological perspective; the problem of spatial visualization in urban studies; and processes of state spatial restructuring, with particular reference to the remaking of urban governance configurations under neoliberalizing capitalism.
In 2014, Brenner was selected as a Thompson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher (https://clarivate.com/hcr/researchers-list/archived-lists/). Based on Web of Science data, his publications were ranked among the top 1% most cited globally in the general social sciences between 2002 and 2012.
Brenner’s most recent books are New Urban Spaces: Urban Theory and the Scale Question (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019); Critique of Urbanization: Selected Essays (Basel: Bauwelt Fundamente Series, Birkhäuser Verlag, 2016); Teoría urbana crítica y políticas de escala (in Spanish; edited and translated by Alvaro Sevilla-Buitrago; Barcelona: Icaria, colección Espacios Críticos, 2016); Stato, spazio, urbanizzazione (in Italian; edited and translated by Teresa Pullano; Milan: Guerini, 2016); The explosion of the urban / La explosion de lo urbano (Spanish and English; Santiago de Chile: ARQ ediciones, 2016); and the edited volume, Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (Jovis, 2014).
Forthcoming books include Is the World Urban? Towards a Critique of Geospatial Ideology (with Nikos Katsikis; Barcelona: Actar, 2019). Other collections of his writings are forthcoming in Chinese under the title 城市，地域，星球：批判城市理论 / City, Territory, Planet: Studies in Critical Urban Theory (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2018); and in Portuguese under the title Espaços de Urbanização: Estudios sobre Teoria Crítica Urbana (Observatório das Metrópoles series, Letra Capital Editora: Rio de Janeiro, 2018).
Brenner’s previous books include New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood (Oxford University Press, 2004) and the co-edited volumes Cities for People, not for Profit: Critical Urban Theory and the Right to the City (with Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer; Routledge 2011); Henri Lefebvre, State, Space, World (with Stuart Elden; co-translated with Gerald Moore and Stuart Elden, University of Minnesota Press, 2009); The Global Cities Reader (with Roger Keil; Routledge, 2006); Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe (with Nik Theodore; Blackwell, 2003); and State/Space: A Reader (with Bob Jessop, Martin Jones and Gordon MacLeod; Blackwell, 2002). Brenner’s books, scholarly articles and essays have been translated into other languages, including Chinese, Croatian, Finnish, French, Hungarian, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish and Turkish. With Christian Schmid of the ETH-Zurich, Brenner is also engaged in a long-term collaborative project on planetary urbanization.
In 2015-2016, along with his collaborators in the Urban Theory Lab, Brenner co-produced Operational Landscapes: Towards an Alternative Cartography of World Urbanization, an exhibition which explores the extension of an urban fabric into some of the world’s most apparently “remote” regions, including the Amazon, the Arctic, the Gobi desert, the Himalayas, the Pacific Ocean, the Sahara desert and Siberia, as well as the earth’s atmosphere. The work was exhibited at the Melbourne School of Design, the Yale School of Architecture, the School of Architecture/Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile and (in a collaboration with Milica Topalovic and Christian Schmid, ETH Zurich/Future Cities Lab Singapore) the Shenzhen Biennale, Radical Urbanism.
Brenner has held visiting professorships in several universities, including the Lim Chong Yah Visiting Professorship (Department of Geography, National University of Singapore), the Wibaut Chair of Urban Studies (Amsterdam Institute for Metropolitan and Development Studies, University of Amsterdam and the Bard Prison Initiative Distinguished Visiting Professorship (Bard College). Brenner is a former Chief Editor of the Studies in Urban and Social Change (SUSC) book series (Blackwell-Wiley), former Interventions and Book Reviews Editor of Antipode and a former editorial board member of International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies and Urban Affairs Review.
Prior to his appointment to the GSD, Brenner was Professor of Sociology and Metropolitan Studies at New York University, where he also served as Director of NYU’s Metropolitan Studies Program. Brenner has co-supervised Ph.D. research in Sociology, Geography, History, Political Science, American Studies, Law & Society, Urban Planning and Architecture, among other fields.
Eve Blau
Eve Blau is Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design at the GSD. She teaches core and elective courses on Urban Form and Design, including Histories and Theories of Urban Form and Design; Cities by Design; Urban Form: Transition as Condition. In recent years she has taught a series of research seminars: Berlin as Laboratory; Baku: Oil City; Mapping Cultural Space Across Eurasia.
Blau is co-director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative , a cross-Harvard program that brings together scholars and resources from across the University to foster innovative approaches to the study of cities and urbanization processes. The initiative has also developed new collaborative research practices that integrate scholarship, design, and media around the study of urban environments, and awards grants to students and faculty across Harvard to pursue urban-focused research projects. She is also the former director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies which sponsors multidisciplinary study of the Eurasian region through the Master’s Degree Program in Regional Studies of Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia (REECA), fellowship programs, seminars, research initiatives, Outreach Programs, and the Davis Center Collection.
Before coming to Harvard, Blau was Curator of Exhibitions and Publications at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Blau’s research engages a range of issues in urban and architectural history and theory and the productive intersection between urban spatial form and media. The underlying concern is with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical, environmental, and technological conditions. The purpose is to understand how these conditions are reorganizing built environments in ways that challenge the fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban. A major focus is on cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world that have experienced large-scale adjustments to new forms of polity, systemic institutional change, and economic reorganization.
Blau has written extensively on modern architecture and urbanism, and has curated numerous exhibitions, including Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative (2018), an exploration of new visual and digital methods for acquiring and producing knowledge about cities. Her books include Baku: Oil and Urbanism (2018), which received the 2019 DAM Architectural Book Award from the German Architecture Museum and Frankfurt Book Fair, and 2020 Bruno Zevi Book Award; The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (1999); German edition: Rotes Wien: Architektur 1919-1934. Stadt-Raum-Politik (2014), which was awarded the 2015 Victor Adler Prize; the Society of Architectural Historians’ Alice Davis Hitchcock Book Award and Spiro Kostof Book Award, and the Austrian Cultural Institute Book Prize; Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (2007); Urban Form. Städtebau in der postfordistischen Gesellschaft / Urban Form: City Building in post-Fordist Society (2003); Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe 1890-1937 (2000) which was also a major international exhibition shown in Prague (Obecni Dum), Montreal (Canadian Centre for Architecture), Los Angeles (Getty Museum), and Vienna (Kunstforum ). She also edited two Special Journal Issues: Harvard Design Magazine 37: Urbanism’s Core (2014) and Architectural History 1999/2000: A Special Issue of JSAH (2000).
In addition to her work on urbanism, Blau has published widely on issues of representation and intersections between art, media, architecture and urbanism. Her books on these topics include Architecture and Cubism (2001/1997), Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation (1989), awarded the Society of Architectural Historians’ Exhibition Catalogue Award, and 1990 AIA Citation for Excellence in International Architectural Book Publishing; Architecture or Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale in the late 1960s (2001) the catalogue of an exhibition at the Yale School of Architecture; Ruskinian Gothic: The Architecture of Deane and Woodward (1982).
Selected articles and book chapters on urban and architectural topics include: “Architecture as Urban Instrument,” in The Emergence of Modernity, Ludwig Boltzmann Gesellschaft, Vienna (2022); “Vienne La Rouge: Changer La Ville Pour Changer La Societé,” Tracés, 3507, Logements Sans Profits Au-delà des Modèles Spéculatifs, 3/2021. “Pedagogy and Politics: Making Place and Learning from Las Vegas,” in Eyes that Saw, Stanislaus von Moos and Martino Stierli, eds. (2020); “Haussmann Becomes Popular: White City, Baku,” Domus. Instant Heritage. No. 1036 (2019); “Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative,” in Ways of Knowing Cities, Laura Kurgan and Dare Brawley, eds. (2019); “Baku Oil and Urbanism: The Dynamics of Scarcity and Surplus,” Topos. Consumption, No.109 (2019); “Forward,” Hermann Czech: Essays on Architecture and City Planning, Elise Feiersinger, ed. (2019); “Isotype and Architectural Knowledge,” in Émigré Design Cultures: Histories of the Social in Design, Alison J. Clarke and Elana Shapira, eds. (2017); “Revisiting Red Vienna as an Urban Project,” in Urban Change. Social Design—Art as Urban Innovation, Anton Falkeis, (2017); “From Red Superblock to Green Megastructure: Municipal Socialism as Model and Challenge,” Architecture and the Welfare State 1918-1979. Mark Swenarton, Tom Avermate, Dirk van den Heuvel, eds. (2015); “The Common Ground of Urban Praxis,” HDM 37: Urbanism’s Core, Harvard Design Magazine Special Issue, Eve Blau, ed. (2014); “Architecture as Instrument,” in Insular Insight: Where Art and Architecture Conspire with Nature: Naoshima,Teshima, Inujima, Akiko Miki, ed. (2011); “Inventing New Hierarchies,” Pritzker Architecture Prize Essay on Kasuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa , 2010 Pritzker Prize Laureates. The Pritzker Architecture Prize. Chicago: The Hyatt Foundation, 2011. “Curating Architecture with Architecture,” Log 20, (Fall 2010); “The Third Project” in Olafur Eliasson: Your chance encounter, Kanazawa 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art (2010); “Tensions in Transparency. Between Information and Experience: The Dialectical Logic of SANAA’s Architecture,” Harvard Design Magazine (Fall 2008); “Transparency and the Irreconcilable Contradictions of Modernity,” PRAXIS 9 (2007).
In 2022, Blau was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2018 she was named a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians; in 2015, Blau was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize [Victor Adler-Staatspreis für Geschichte sozialer Bewegungen] by the Republic of Austria for her contributions to the history of social movements and for the innovative methods of her scholarship.
She was Clarkson Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning and Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor of Art History at the Clark Art Museum. Blau is the recipient of fellowships from the J. Paul Getty Trust; Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton; Mellon Foundation; International Center or Cultural Studies, Vienna; Graham Foundation; Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College; National Endowment for the Humanities; American Council of Learned Societies; American Philosophical Society.
Blau is President of the Board of Directors, of the AFCCA, Canadian Centre for Architecture; former Vice President of the International Scholarly Advisory Board of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies_IFK (Vienna). She is a member of the Scientific Board, gta papers, ETH Zurich Institute for History and Theory of Architecture; the Advisory Board of Columbia Themes in Philosophy, Social Criticism, and the Arts, Columbia University Press; Editorial Board of the Journal of Planning History; Scientific Review Board, LIStLab, Laboratorio Internationale di Strategie, Barcelona -Trento; and Scientific Committee, Histories of Post-War Architecture (HsPWA).