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Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History
and Theory of Architecture
Diplom Architekt. ETH: 1980
Ph.D. MIT: 1986
Jarzombek works on a wide range of topics – both
historical and theoretical. He is one of the country’s
leading advocates for global history and has published
several books and articles on that topic, including the
ground-breaking textbook entitled A Global History of
Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006) with
co-author Vikramaditya Prakash and with the noted
illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. He is the sole author
of Architecture of First
Societies: A Global Perspective (Wiley
Press, 2013), which is a sensitive synthesis of first
society architecture through time and includes custom-made
drawings, maps and photographs. The book builds on the
latest research in archeological and anthropological
knowledge while at the same time challenging some of their
received perspectives.
Jarzombek recently published a book that
interrogates the digital/global imaginaries that shape our
lives. Digital Stockholm
Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University
of Minnesota Press, 2016).
Jarzombek’s ground-breaking work on global architecture
history was highlighted by a 2.5 million dollar grant from
the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that Jarzombek received
with co-PI, Vikramaditya Prakash (University of
Washington, Seattle), to create a new scholarly entity
called Global Architecture History Teaching
Collaborative (GAHTC). Promoting the development and
exchange of teaching materials for architectural history
education across the globe, the collaborative provides
awards to members and their teams to develop new lecture
material from global perspectives.
Through EdX, Jarzombek taught the first ever MOOC
(mass open online course) on the history of architecture
with thousands of participants, world-wide. It is based on
the undergraduate course that he teaches 4.605: A Global History of
Architecture.
Jarzombek's and Prakash's other joint venture is the
Architecture (Un)certainty Lab [A(U)L], which is
dedicated to challenging architecture's epistemological
and design capacities and bring the conversation
back into a world of immersive ambiguities. A(U)L is the
pedagogical wing of O(U)R, [Office for (Un)certainty
Research] the project-oriented studio that is also
run by Jarzombek and Prakash.
Urban destruction in the modern era is another focus of
Jarzombek's work. His Urban Heterology: Dresden and
the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History takes on
the issue of how erasure and rebuilding in Dresden force
us to rethink the conventions of urban history. The issue
is also at the core of the book about Krzysztof Wodiczko,
City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, which Jarzombek
edited with Mechtild Widrich. He is currently working on a
book called Architecture Modernity Enlightenment
that reassesses contemporary architecture from the
perspective of Enlightenment philosophers. His most recent
book is Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the
Post-Ontological Age .
He was a CASVA fellow (1985), Post-doctoral Resident
Fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of
Humanities and Art, Santa Monica, California (1986), a
fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ
(1993), at the Canadian Center for Architecture (2001) and
at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2005).
He serves on the board of several journals and academic
institutions including the SSRC and the Buell Foundation,
and was a member of the 2011 Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research
Foundation) "Excellence Initiative."
Jarzombek has organized several major international
conferences on topics such as Holocaust Memorials,
Architecture and Cultural Studies, and East European
Architecture. He was the founding faculty editor of Thresholds,
an annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the
Department of Architecture. The content of which features
leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of
architecture, art, and cultural studies.
Latest publications:
THE DATA-HUMAN: WHO ARE WE? EXPLORING THE QUESTIONS OF OUR IDENTITY IN THE DIGITAL AGE
No one disputes that we live in a Digital Age. But unlike the transition into the Modern Age and the advent of various types of machines and technologies
transition that we could see and experience as different and alienating entering into the Digital Age has been more insidious.
This book opens a visual history that asks: How did we get where we are? A simple question, but not easy to answer since the world of algorithms is almost completely invisible to the common person, and yet is already everywhere, and as a result, we are no longer simply humans.
The book, a companion to Jarzombeks Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press) looks at a wide range of advertisements, scientific papers, journals, political and legal events and ransomware histories as a visual panorama of material interspersed with comments, graphs and questions that allow for a more robust conversation about the digitally-modified, digitally-enhanced, digitally-polluted human.
The book was part of a research project seminar that I ran at MIT. I want to thank in particular: Iris Karamouzi as well as Kyle Branchesi, Gideon Schwartzman and Nitzan Zilberman.
E-FLUX
The Settler Colonial Present: Three Corrections
Digital Post Ontology
Distributed Learning>
The Quadrivium Industrial Complex>
The School of Architecture Scandals>
How to Think Global
," Interview on Architecture Talk
https://www.architecturetalk.org/home/35
with Vikram Prakash. In this episode, Mark
Jarzombek and Vikram Prakash engage in a far-ranging and
open-ended discussion on the question of the global.
Circulating around the question of the larger agenda of
the global, discussion topics include modernity and its
critiques, the nation-state and its limits, autobiography
and its pitfalls, and the ways in which global thinking
(dis)connects with deconstruction.
"The
Identitarian Episteme: 1980s and the Status of
Architectural History," in After Effects:
Theories and Methodologies in Architectural Research, Edited
by Helene Frichot, Gunnar Sandin, and Bettina Schwalm,
(London: Actar Publishers, 2018), pp. 99-109. The 1980s
saw several important transformations in the field of
architectural history, mostly, one can say from 'below',
namely from the fields of ethnography ans vernacular
studies. For many, the opening of interest in 'the local'
was a refreshing expansion from the days of Eurocentrism.
And indeed, much important work was done in these fields.
Nonetheless, there was an unexpected consequence, for one
also came to see in parallel the growth of a
quasi-academic or a sub-academic world that championed a
wide range of ethno-centric, political movements often in
alliance with nation-based worldviews. The populist
embrace of local histories, that one can loosely place in
the zone of postmodern indentitarianism, often saw
architecture as playing an important role as the site of
revival or survival in an increasingly globalized world.
The use of the term 'traditional architecture' escalated
as did the number of village reconstructions and
ethnographic museums. This 'identitarian episteme', as I
call it, was thus itself a global phenomenon with its own
disciplinary behaviors and agendas. My paper tries to
address this phenomenon and identify avenues by which it
can be studied and critiqued.
“Husserl and the Problem of
Worldliness,” Log 42, 2018,
pp. 67 - 79. In sentence two of Ideas:
General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913),
Edmund Husserl introduces the word World
(Welt). What does Husserl mean with the word? I
could have taken a broad view of his writings, but
instead what I am doing here is reading Ideas sentence
by sentence from the beginning, interpreting as I go as
if Husserl were in a type of conversation with earlier
philosophers. The sub-text of my discussion is a larger
exploration of the status of that mysterious word -
World - in colonial-era thinking. Needless to say,
European 19th century philosophy never rose to the
occasion of critique, so one has to chase after the
repressed to make philosophy speak despite
itself. I argue that Husserl delaminates Welt from
Kant’s Weltbürger and Hegel’s Weltgeschichte to
create a stand alone imaginary that is, ironically and
tragically, opposed to the specter of worldliness.
Ultimately the question for me is to understand the
difference between World and Global.
"Borneo:
The River Effect and the Spirit World Millionaires" in
A History of Architecture and Trade, Edited by Patrick
Haughey (London: Routledge, 2018) 80 – 114. This article
looks at the upstream trade into Borneo, one of the main
wealth-producing areas of SE Asia. My article challenges
the more conventional privileging of ‘downstream’ trade in
the narratives of SE Asian trade. The upstream trade was
wealth-producing in its own right, though not technically
‘trade’ since commodity exchanges were oriented around the
wealth of – and wealth-making capacity of – the long-house
ancestors. Based on this argument we can better understand
the processes by which the civilizations beginning in the
18th century slowly but inextricably altered and
eventually completely decommissioned the exchange capacity
of the local Borneo communities. My sources are the
numerous accounts of travelers, traders and explorers from
the 19th- and 20th- centuries.
“Positioning the Global
Imaginary: Arata Isozaki, 1970,” Critical
Inquiry 44 (Spring 2018), 498 – 527. This
article uses the early work of the Japanese architect
Arata Isozaki as well as first publications of the
Japanese journal Global Architecture as
lenses by which to discuss the history of the word
‘global.’ In these contexts, the word meant something
altogether different and more interesting than in the
context of the U.S. I also argue that much of the
theoretical flavor of that was implied by the term in the
1970s has long since been lost in the current trend of
global-washing.
Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the
Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press,
2016). Once, humans were what they believed. Now, the
modern person is determined by data exhaust—an invisible
anthropocentric ether of ones and zeros that is a product
of our digitally monitored age. I argue that the world has
become redesigned to fuse the algorithmic with the
ontological, and the discussion of ontology must be
updated to rethink the question of Being.
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