The gta Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture welcomes two visiting lecturers
Frederike Lausch is an architectural historian and co-founder of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture. Demetra Vogiatzaki is a licensed architect-engineer and a historian of 18th-century architecture.
Dr. Frederike Lausch is visiting lecturer at the gta Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture since February 2024. Lausch is an architectural historian and co-founder of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture. Her research focuses on the political implications of architectural discourses and theories in the 20th century. Lausch studied architecture at Bauhaus University in Weimar and Middle East Technical University in Ankara, and received her doctoral degree in Art History from Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main in 2019. She has worked as a researcher and lecturer at Goethe-University, RWTH Aachen and Technical University of Darmstadt, and has held fellowships from Wüstenrot Foundation, DAAD and Max Weber Foundation.
During her visiting lectureship at D-ARCH, Lausch will explore the interconnection between architects’ critiques of industrialization, concerns about ecology and energy conservation in the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, and their interest in development politics. In teaching Lausch is examining the impact of international organizations in conjunction with the utilization of media of development. Other topics are the industrialization’s footprint, a critical dialogue on development and ecology, designing with the sun – from ‘building in the tropics’ to energy efficient and ecological building – and architectures of degrowth, including theories and model projects of alternative economies.
Collectivity and collaboration
Dr. Dimitra Vogiatzaki, the second visiting lecturer, will start at gta in September. She is a licensed architect-engineer and a historian of 18th-century architecture, holding a Ph.D. in History of Architecture from Harvard University. Her doctoral research focused on the politics of architectural imagination in the Enlightenment, while her current work is geared towards the critical infrastructure of the French colonial state in Canada. As a trained designer, she cares about architectural form. Her pedagogy revolves around the history and theory of architecture regarding ecology, gender, and colonialism. She is particularly invested in questions of collectivity and collaboration, researching the theories of these ideas in the context of the French Enlightenment and beyond.
In 2023 Vogiatzaki was elected to the Board of Historians of Eighteenth-Century Art and Architecture (HECAA). She is an organizer of DocTalks, an online forum by and for PhD students, postdocs and early career researchers in architectural history and theory. In the past years, she represented the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the Harvard-wide Mental Health Task Force. Vogiatzaki has joined forces with colleagues from other institutions on events foregrounding queer perspectives in design and the importance of labor and social justice movements as part of the Princeton-led queer space working group initiative.