About

Within the framework of the visiting lectureship, the interconnection between architects’ critiques of industrialization, concerns about ecology and energy conservation in the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, and their vested interest in development politics will be explored.

Architecture’s multi-layered involvement in development projects – functioning both as a strategic instrument and an object of development and, as a discipline and discourse, actively participating in the development discourse and perpetuating colonial narratives – appears to have influenced an intensive exploration of energy-efficient construction technologies and alternative economies within the European architectural discourses. Faced with ecological crises, valuable lessons were believed to be derived not only from the tangible reality but also from a deliberately crafted image of ''non-industrialized countries" and their diverse, resilient alternatives that resist Western ideologies of economic profit, consumerism, and industrial modernization. How did sustainable architectural practices emerge as architects engaged with various forms of knowledge transfer, development concepts, critiques and imaginaries?

Dr. Frederike Lausch is an architecture historian and co-founder of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture (CCSA). Her research on the political implications of architectural discourses and theories in the 20th century includes examining the conceptualization of the relationship between architecture and politics, exploring the discipline’s potentials and limitations as a political actor, and investigating how architects, architectural theorists, and historians positioned themselves in relation to politics. Given the complex nature of history and the challenges involved in constructing historical narratives, she employs discourse analysis, archival research, and oral history as methods to capture controversies, ambivalences, and multiple perspectives on history.

Her doctoral dissertation is a study on the ambivalent impact of “French Theory” on 1990s architecture. Through a discourse analysis of the Anyone Corporation’s publications, she showed how they detached Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theories from their political impetus, minimized the liberating potential and socio-political responsibility of architecture and used philosophy as a machine for distinction and identity construction.

In a second research project conducted in 2019 at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, she worked on the post-war reception of architecture during National Socialism. Through meticulous archival research and the reconstruction of a forgotten discourse, she examined how the National Socialist past has been controversially debated in German architectural discourses since the 1970s, focusing on Max Bächer, his attempt to write a book on fascism and architecture and his failure to accomplish this.

Currently, she focuses on architecture and politics in the context of discourses on sustainability and development politics, investigating the Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance (CCSK), founded by architects Yona Friedman and Eda Schaur and funded by the United Nations University and UNESCO.

Contact

Dr. Frederike Lausch
Lecturer at the Department of Architecture
  • HIL D 72.3
  • lausch@arch.ethz.ch

Gastdoz. Architekturtheorie gta
Stefano-Franscini-Platz 5
8093 Zürich
Switzerland