Eiermann-Postdoc-Stipendium
The fellowship is awarded 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.
Egon Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellow:
Dr. Oxana Gourinovitch
The gta Institute is proud to announce Oxana Gourinovitch as its second Egon Eiermann Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Gourinovitch will be working on a research project entitled “The Mushroom and the Cloud. Mapping Spaces that Uranium Made, Chapter Wismut” during the 2024/25 academic year.
Dr. Oxana Gourinovitch is an architect, curator, and architectural historian. She holds master’s degree in architecture from the University of Arts Berlin (2005) and a PhD from the Technical University Berlin (2020). She worked at architectural offices in Berlin, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, taught at the TU Berlin and RWTH Aachen and was a fellow of the Canadian Center for Architecture/ Window Research Institute Tokio at the CCA in Montreal. Her research focuses on the built environments of state socialism, investigating their involvement with the geopolitical transformations of the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), Mare-Balticum-Foundation, and the Graham Foundation and awarded, among others, with Margo and Paul Baumgarten Scholarship, and the Tiburtius Prize of the Berlin Universities.
The Mushroom and the Cloud. Mapping Spaces that Uranium Made, Chapter Wismut
At the onset of the Cold War, Soviet military geologists who arrived in the occupied German territories with the Red Army, found pitchblende, the uranium ore, in the old silver mines of the Ore Mountains. The following discovery of large deposits of the radioactive mineral paved the way for a nuclear race between the political adversaries divided by the Iron Curtain, and marked the beginning of the Nuclear Age. The discovery also subjected the Soviet-controlled German regions of Saxony and Thuringia to an expansive extractive operation that would propel the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) into becoming the main supplier of uranium to the Soviet nuclear project and one of the largest uranium ore producers globally.
The joint-stock company in charge of the mining, the Soviet-German Wismut AG, quickly established itself as a “state within a state” in the GDR. Besides expansive facilities for extraction, transportation, and processing of the ore, Wismut developed its own networks to provide for housing, consume, sport, education, culture, and entertainment of its labour force, whose numbers peaked at 130,000 in the 1950s, and built up a health system that outsized the health system of the host country. Despite its militarised secrecy, Wismut maintained close spatial proximity to the civil society of the affected regions, which came at great cost to the regions’ social ecologies.
The project investigates the history and legacy of the regions’ spatial transformation inflicted during the forty years of the uranium mining company’s operation. The aggregate under- and aboveground built environments of Wismut offer herewith an exemplarily case, which is both specific and universal, for the inquiry on how industrialisation of extraction shaped spatial thinking and acting in the 20th century.