Prof. Dr. Alla Vronskaya

2014 Ph.D. in History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Department of Architecture

Dissertation: The Productive Unconscious: Architecture, Experimental Psychology and Techniques of Subjectivity in Soviet Russia, 1919-1935

2007 Candidate of Arts and Sciences in Art History, State Institute of Art Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

2004 Specialist in Philosophy, Moscow State University, Department of Philosophy

EMPLOYMENT

2016-2017 2014-2016 2008-2012 2006-2017

Professor für Architekturgeschichte, Universität Kassel

Assistant Professor (tenure-track), Illinois Institute of Technology, College of Architecture

Visiting Lecturer of Architectural Theory, ETH Zurich

Postdoctoral Fellow, Chair Prof. Philip Ursprung, ETH Zurich

Teaching assistant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Research Fellow, Department of Classical Western Art, State Institute of Art Research, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow

SCHOLARSHIPS AND FELLOWSHIPS

2019 Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton, NJ), School of Historical Studies, Herodotus Fund member, 2019/2020

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2016 Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC), acquisition grant for lecture course “Between Constantinople and Karakorum: the Architecture of Pre-Modern Russia” (with Igor Demchenko)

2012 Swiss Government Excellence Fellowship, 2012/2013 (deferred to 2013/2014)
2012 The Getty Research Institute Pre-doctoral Fellowship, 2012/2013
2012 DAAD Research Scholarship, 2012-2013 (declined)
2011 Dumbarton Oaks Research Library Junior Fellowship in Garden and Landscape Studies 2011 DAAD Intensive German Language Summer School Scholarship

2010 Victorian Society in America Newport Summer School Scholarship 2009 Hyzen Travel Fellowship, MIT
2009 CCA (Canadian Center for Architecture)-HTC Research Fellowship 2008 MIT MISTI Germany Scholarship

2008 Social Science Research Council (SSRC) Dissertation Proposal Development Fellowship (DPDF)

2008 Victorian Society in America London Summer School Scholarship 2007 MIT Presidential Fellowship
2005 The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, Junior Fellowship 2004 European Gardens Scholarship

SCHOLARLY PUBLICATIONS Edited Volumes

Area editor (“The Former Soviet Union”) in Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, Lori Brown and Karen Burns, general editors, London: Bloomsbury (co-edited with Tijana Vujosevic, in progress)

In the Distance *research-in-progress 2010. Cambridge, MA: Puritan Press, 2011 (co-edited with Ana Maria Leon)

Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters

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“We Are Always Celebrating: Betty Glan’s Embodied Vitalism,” gta Papers, ed. by Adam Jasper (in progress)

“From the Aesthetics of Life to the Dialectics of Collectivity: Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexander Bogdanov, and Maxim Gorky, 1905-1917,” Productive Universals – Specific Situations. Critical Engagement in Art, Architecture, Design and Urbanism, ed. by Anne Kockelkorn and Nina Zschocke (Berlin and New York: Sternberg Press, 2019), 316-335

“Architectures of the Ineffable: The Reification of Human-ness and Environmentality,” position statement in “Architecture and Environment,” ed. by Torsten Lange and Sophie Hochhäusl, Architectural Histories, 6(1):20: 1-13 (co-authored with Ginger Nolan)

“Anti-Architectures of Self-Incurred Immaturity,” Alternative Postmodernisms, ed. by Vladimir Kulic. London: Bloomsbury, 2019, 143-159

“Objects-Organizers: the Monism of Things and the Art of Socialist Spectacle,” A History of Russian Exposition and Festival Architecture, 1700-2014, ed. by Alexander Ortenberg and Alla Aronova. London: Routledge, 2018, 151-167

“Das farbige Zürich: Art, Technology, Regulation,” Trans 30 (2017): 90-97.
“‘Deconstructing Constructivism,” Re-framing Identities: Architecture's Turn to History, 1970-1990,

ed. by Ákos Moravánszky and Torsten Lange. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016, 149-163

“The Architecture of the Unconscious: Empiriocriticism and Nikolai Ladovskii’s ‘Psycho-analytical Method’ at VKhUTEMAS,” Architecture and the Unconscious, ed. by John Hendrix and Lorens Holm. London: Ashgate, 2016, 77-96

“The Utopia of Personality: Moisei Ginzburg’s Project for the Moscow Park of Culture and Leisure,” Quaestio Rossica, 2015, No. 4: 40-56

“Invisible Colors: the Narkomfin House-Painting Experiment,” Narkomfin. The O’Neil Ford Monograph Series, Vol. 6. Ed. by Wilfied Wang and Danilo Udovicki-Selb. Austin, TX: The University of Texas at Austin, 2015, 58-64

“Urbanist Landscape: Militsa Prokhorova, Liubov’ Zalesskaia, and the Emergence of Soviet Landscape Architecture,” Women, Modernity, and Landscape Architecture. Ed. by John Beardsley and Sonja Duempelmann. London: Routledge, 2015, 60-80

“Shaping Eternity: the Preservation of Lenin’s Body,” Thresholds, no.38 (2011): 10-13

“The Transformation of the Concept of the Old English Garden and Interpretations of Garden History during the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes, Oct.-Dec. 2006, Vol. 26, No. 4: 267-274

Other Academic Formats

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“Soviet Architecture,” Oxford Bibliographies in Art History ed. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann (New York: Oxford University Press). Online resource (in progress)

Review of: Richard Anderson, Russia (London: Reaction Books, 2015) and Tijana Vujosevic, Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (Manchester, UK: University of Manchester Press, 2017), Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 62, Issue 2 (Summer 2018): 444-446

“The Tower and the Crossroads,” The Swiss Space Center: A New Ground Station for Earth Observation, ed. by Juan José Castellón and Pierluigi D’Acunto (ETH Zurich, 2019, forthcoming)

Review of: Moisei Ginzburg, Dwelling (1934; English translation 2017), The Architectural Review, October 2017, 34-41

“Beyond ‘The Avant-Garde and Totalitarianism’,” Proceedings of European Architectural History Network 2015 Conference. Ed. by Liliana Blagoevic, Belgrade: The University of Belgrade, 2016, 26-30

Entries to Routledge Encyclopaedia of Modernism: “Iakov Chernikhov,” “Il’ia Golosov,” “El Lissitzky,” “Rationalism,” “Urbanism and Disurbanism,” “VKhUTEMAS.” 2015 (online)

“Two Utopias of Georgii Krutikov’s City of the Future,” WRITING CITIES. Working Papers Volume 2. DISTANCE AND CITIES: Where do we stand? London: London School of Economics and Political Science, 2012, 46-56

“Direct from Nature” (CCA Scholar’s Choice, 2009), published online at www.cca.qc.ca/en/issues/11/nature-reorganized/647/direct-from-nature

INVITED LECTURES

2018 Florida Atlantic University, Department of Architecture lecture series, 30 October

2017 “Digging Canals, Building Civilizations: Architecture and Development between Mars and Earth,” University of Basel, eikones NFS Bildkritik, 11 May

2016 “Colors of the Unseen: Designing the Workforce in Interwar Moscow,” University of Toronto, Department of Art History, 25 January

2015 “The Switching Zone: Moscow Gorky Park and the Development of the New Personality,” University of Basel, Kunstgeschichtlicher Forum, December 2

2015 “The Magic of the Absurd,” ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture

2015 “Color at Work: Wallpainting and the Design of Modernist Subjectivity,” École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Department of Architecture, 13 February

2013 “The Energy of Color: Wallpainting and the Modernist Subject in the USSR, 1928-1932,” 4

Getty Research Institute, March 14

2011 “Landscape as Experience: Rationalist Movement in Soviet Architecture,” Dumbarton Oaks Research Library, 17 October

ACADEMIC WORKSHOPS PARTICIPATION

By invitation:

2020 Learning from Socialism: Alternative Modernities in the Second World (organized by Kimberly E. Zarecor and Vladimir Kulic), University of Iowa, April (forthcoming)

2017 The Architecture of Research, ETH Zurich, April 28 (together with Pierluigi D’Acunto, Juan Jose Castellon Gonzalez, and Torsten Lange)

2016 Textures of Work, The Terra Foundation/Clark Art Institute, Giverny, France, September 26- 30

2015 Territoriality, University of Basel, December 21
By application:
2011 Writing Cities, London School of Economics, May 18
2008 Urban Visual Studies, St. Louis, June (Part 1); Milwaukee, September (Part 2)

CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION

2020 “Towards a Territorial History of (a Northern) ‘Desert,’” Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), Seattle, April-May (forthcoming)

2019 “Between Constantinople and Karakorum: the Architecture of Pre-Modern Russia,” GAHTC Members’ Conference, Miami, April 5-6

2019 “Monistic Modernism: Soviet Architectural Theory between Humanism and Anti- Humanism,” College Art Association (CAA), New York, February 13-16

2019 “River Trade and Proto-Urbanization on the East-European Plane,” American Historical Association (AHA), Chicago, January 4

2018 “The Eye of the Architect,” “What is a School (of architecture, landscape, art, and urbanism)?” University of Toronto, April 27-28 (by invitation)

2018 Co-organizer of “Designing Homo Sapiens: Architecture, Environment, and the Human Sciences” panel at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting, St. Paul, April

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2018 (with Ginger Nolan)
2017 “Anti-Architectures of Late-Socialist Disenchantment,” The Geopolitical Aesthetic of

(Post)Socialisms: China, Russia, and Beyond, Princeton University, September 29-30
2017 “The Magic of the Absurd: ‘Paper Architecture’ in the USSR,” College Art Association

(CAA), New York, February 18

2016 Co-organizer of “Beyond Constructivism” panel at European Architectural History Network biannual conference, Dublin, Ireland, June 2-4 (with Tijana Vujosevic)

2016 Co-organizer of “Reassessing the Historiography of Socialist Architecture” panel at the Society of Architectural Historians annual meeting, Pasadena, CA, April 6-10 (with Danilo Udovicki-Selb)

2016 Co-organizer of “Aesthetics and Art Theory in Socialist Context,” panel at College Art Association (CAA) annual meeting, Washington, DC, February 3-6 (with Angelina Lucento)

2015 “The Beauty of Life: Empriocriticism and Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Positive Aesthetics” (presentation); co-organizer of “An Aesthetics for the Collective: Anatolii Lunacharskii and the Development of Early Soviet Visual Culture” panel (with Angelina Lucento); chair of “Sci-Fi Worlds: Fictions at the Edge of Science” panel at Association of Slavic, East- European and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) annual convention, Philadelphia, November 19-22

2015 “Beyond the ‘Avant-Garde and Totalitarianism,’” European Architectural History Network conference, Belgrade, Serbia, October 14-17

2015 “‘Deconstructivist Architecture’ and the Rediscovery of the Russian Avant-Garde,” Re- Framing Identities, ETH Zurich, September 10-12

2014 “Architecture of the Unconscious: ‘Psychoanalytical Method’ at VKhUTEMAS,” Society of Architectural Historians Annual Convention, Austin, April 9-13

2012 “‘Montage and Architecture’: Movement and Rhythm in the Architectural Theory of Soviet Rationalism,” Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Annual Convention, New Orleans, November 15-18

2012 “From Analysis to Synthesis: Soviet Modernist Architecture as Organization,” Design, History, Revolution, New School of Design, April 27-28

2011 “The Red and the Green: Ozelenenie Campaign in the USSR (1931),” Color Green, University of Virginia Art History Department Graduate Student Symposium, March 25-26

2011 “Long Live Individuality! Psychotechnics and Architectural Pedagogy in Soviet Russia,” Teaching Architecture Practicing Pedagogy, SoA, Princeton University, February 11-12

2010 “Central Park of Culture and Leisure in Ladovskii’s Workshop’ Student Projects: Space as a Movement,” The Space of VKhUTEMAS: Heritage, Traditions, Innovations, Moscow

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Institute of Architecture (MARHI), November 17-19
2010 “People’s Park: The Agency of the Public and Landscape Architecture in the Late-Stalinist

USSR,” Architecture and the State, 1940s-1970s, GSAPP, Columbia University, April 2-3 2010 “Revolution at a Standstill: The Preservation of Lenin’s Body,” Explosive Past, Radiant

Future, The Centre for Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto, March 18-20

2010 “A Post-Utopian Landscape: Disurbanist Projects for Gorky Park of Culture and Rest,” Avant-garde and Totalitarianism Revisited: Soviet Visual Culture, 1920s-1940s, Northwestern University, March 4-5 (by invitation)

2010 “‘Landscape Dis-Urbanism’: Moisei Ginzburg’s Project for the Central Park of Culture and Rest and the Problem of Socialist Landscape,” New England Chapter, Society of Architectural Historians Student Conference, February 15

2009 “On the Origins of Parks of Culture and Rest, or Why Avant-Garde Did Not Flourish in Soviet Gardens,” What site?” *research-in-progress Graduate Student Conference, MIT, April

2006 “The Gardens of Sir Reginald Blomfield: Realizing a Vision of the National Past,” The Edwardians, University of Hertfordshire, July

2006 “Between Science and Poetry: Popular Botany in the Victorian Period,” INCS (Interdisciplinary Nineteenth Century Studies) International Conference 2006, Durham University, July

2006 “The Concept of the Old English Garden in the Nineteenth- and Early-Twentieth-Century Historiography,” XVI Graduate Art History Symposium, Indiana University, Bloomington, April

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

2017- (ongoing) Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), College of Architecture: Assistant Professor

Architecture and the Environment: graduate-level seminar (Fall 2018)
Architecture in the World of Production: graduate-level seminar (Spring 2018, Spring 2019) A Critical History of IIT Campus: undergraduate-level seminar, co-taught (Spring 2018) Global Modernisms: graduate-level lecture (Fall 2017, Fall 2018)
History of Landscape Architecture: graduate/undergraduate-level lecture (Spring 2019)

2013- ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture: Visiting Lecturer 7

The Household: An Architecture for Living Together: graduate-level seminar, co-taught (Spring 2017)

Theory of Architecture II: Architecture and Experience: undergraduate-level lecture (Spring 2017)

Theory of Architecture I: Architectural Theory in the History of Knowledge: undergraduate- level lecture (Fall 2016)

Theory of Architecture II: Strategies and Contexts: undergraduate-level lecture (Spring 2016)

Curating 1917: The Architecture of the Russian Revolution: graduate-level seminar, co-taught (Fall 2016)

Moscow: 99 Years Later: graduate/undergraduate-level study trip (Fall 2016) Architect as Producer: graduate-level seminar, co-taught (Spring 2016)
The Art and Architecture of Bodily Perception: graduate-level seminar (Spring 2015)

2008-2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture: Teaching Assistant

Modern Art and Mass Culture: undergraduate-level discussion sessions (Prof. Caroline Jones, Spring 2009)

Introduction to the History and Theory of Architecture: undergraduate-level discussion sessions (Prof. David Friedman, Fall 2008)

Guest Lectures:

2020 Iowa State University (Professor Vladimir Kulic)

2018 SAIC (Professor Jennifer Lee)

2014-2017 ETH Zurich (for Prof. Philip Ursprung, Prof. Laurent Stalder, Prof. Joseph Schwartz, and Dr. Nina Zschocke in graduate and undergraduate courses)

2014 UCLA (Professor Michael Osman) Visiting Critic for Design Reviews:

2019-2020 UCLA (Professor Alexander Ortenberg)

2017-2018 University of Wisconsin Milwaukee (MArch thesis reviews) 8

IIT (Professors Ron Henderson/Trevor Lee, Catherine Wetzel, Monika Thadhani/ Christopher Groesbeck, Lluís Ortega)

2016-2017 ETH Zurich (Prof. Adam Caruso, Prof. Joseph Schwarz)

GRADUATE STUDENT WORK ADVISED

Ph.D. Dissertations

Marcos Petroli, “The Turn to History: Arches, Domes, and Vaults in the Construction of a Modern Civic Monumentality,” IIT (dissertation committee member, in progress)

Mohammed H. Alkhabbaz, “Leaping into Modernity: Petro-Islamic Architecture in Saudi Arabia, 1962-1986,” IIT (dissertation committee member, 2018)

Dan Costa Baciu, “Everything Called Chicago School: How a New Tradition Evolved,” IIT (dissertation committee member, 2018)

MArch Independent Studies in the History of Art and Architecture, ETH Zurich

Tamim Hokan, „Die Poetik des verlorenen Raumes“ (Spring 2017-Fall 2917)
Marcus Maier, “Repetition and Difference in Architecture” (Spring 2017-Fall 2017)
Elizaveta Radi, „Chruschtschowki: Die Rolle des Architekten“ (Fall 2016, co-advised)
Sebastian Linsin, „Geologie und Linie: Zum Verhältnis von Wissenschaft und Ästhetik in John Ruskins Alpendarstellungen von 1842-1858“ (Fall 2015, co-advised)
Lena Stäheli, „Die Beziehung von Mensch und Raum am Beispiel des Japanischen Tee-Hauses Tai- An“ (Fall 2014-Spring 2015)
Marisa Muscionico und Sabrina Basler, „Europa-Allee“ (Fall 2014-Spring 2015)
Vera Raskina, „Macht, Stadt und Erinnerung: Machtrepräsentation in der Architektur des imperialistischen Sankt-Petersburgs und sowjetischen Leningrads“ (Fall 2014)

PROFESSIONAL AND ACADEMIC SERVICE

2020 Manuscript reviewer, Arts
2020 Manuscript reviewer, Architectural Histories
2020 Tatiana Efrussi, “Hannes Meyer—A Soviet Architect. Life and Work in the USSR.

1930-1936,” Kassel University (dissertation respondent, 2020)
2020 Manuscript reviewer, Quaderni della Bibliotheca Hertziana
2017 Organizer, Mies and the City, roundtable at Illinois Institute of Technology,

November 9
2017 Manuscript reviewer, The Journal of Architecture
2017 Manuscript reviewer, Mesto a dejiny [The City and History, Slovakia]
2017 Manuscript reviewer, Architectural Histories
2017 Panel moderator at Architecture and Wars conference, ETH Zurich, 3 June 2017 Organizer of guest lecture of Dr. Peter Christensen, ETH Zurich, January 28 2017 Organizer of guest lecture of Dr. Tijana Vujosevic, ETH Zurich, January 21

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2016 Roundtable moderator at More Models conference, ETH Zurich, October 4 2016 Respondent at The Limits of Europe workshop, ETH Zurich, May 31
2016 Manuscript reviewer, bfo-Journal
2013 Manuscript reviewer, Journal of Architectural Education

2012-2013 Member-at-large at the Society of Historians of East-European, Eurasian, and Russian Art (SHERA)

2011 Manuscript reviewer, Landscape Journal
2010 Co-organizer of In the Distance, “*research-in-progress” Graduate Student

Conference, MIT
2006 World Monuments Fund: Site representative for Semenovskoe-Otrada country-estate

in the World Monuments Watch list of 100 Most Endangered Sites of 2006 SERVICE TO INSTITUTION

2018-2019 IIT committee work (University Faculty Council (UFC); GRC Library Committee; IIT UFC Library Committee (UFCLC); IIT Finance committee (UFCFC))
IIT student advising (8-10 undergraduate and 5 graduate students)

2017-2018 IIT (GRC Library Committee)

INVITED LECTURES IN NON-ACADEMIC CONTEXT

2016 “Learning to Fly,” Total Recall, BHSF-Werkstattgespräche, Zurich, 15 December

2016 “Designing a Flying City: Geogrii Krutikov’s Four-dimensional Architecture,” Counter Space, Zurich, 16 September

2016 “Utopia in the Skies,” Kunstraum Sihlquai55, Zurich, 14 May

ASSOCIATIONS

College Art Association (CAA)
European Architectural History Network (EAHN) Society of Architectural Historians (SAH)

Society of Historians of East-European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture (SHERA) Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES)
Moscow Academic Committee for the Preservation of the VKHUTEMAS Legacy

RESEARCH LANGUAGES

Russian (native), English, German (Level C1), French (reading knowledge) 10

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