Oxana Gourinovitch receives second Egon Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellowship
The architect, curator, and architectural historian is joining the gta Institute during the 2024/25 academic year. In her research project, she is investigating the history and spatial legacy of the uranium mining operation in the GDR.
The Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellowship is awarded since 2022 for one academic year to postdoctoral researchers in the history and theory of architecture who focus on modern architecture in Europe and related topics. The fellowship is generously supported by the Peter und Waltraud Betsche Fonds in memory of the German architect Egon Eiermann. During the 2024/25 academic year, the gta Institute welcomes Dr. Oxana Gourinovitch as its second Egon Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellow. She is an architect, curator, and architectural historian with a PhD from the Technical University Berlin. Her research focuses on the built environments of state socialism, investigating their involvement with the geopolitical transformations of the 20th and 21st centuries.
At the gta Institute Gourinovitch is working on a research project entitled “The Mushroom and the Cloud. Mapping Spaces that Uranium Made, Chapter Wismut”. The project investigates the history and legacy of the Soviet-German uranium mining operation Wismut AG and its spatial transformation inflicted during the forty years of the company’s operation in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). "The aggregate under- and aboveground built environments of Wismut offer herewith an exemplary case, which is both specific and universal, for the inquiry on how industrialisation of extraction shaped spatial thinking and acting in the 20th century", the gta Institute writes in an article about the project on its website.