Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture, works on a wide range of historical topics from the 12th century to the modern era with a particular focus on nineteenth and twentieth century aesthetics, and the history and theory of architecture.

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 Vikram 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.

His ground-breaking work on global architecture history is further highlighted by a million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that Jarzombek received 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 ofparticipants, world-wide.

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. His is currently working on a book called Architecture Modernity Enlightenment that reassesses contemporary architecture from the perspective of Enlightenment philosophers.

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 is the faculty editor of Thresholds, an annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the Department of Architecture and held in over 150 university art and architecture libraries around the world. The content features leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, art, and cultural studies.

Recent Class

The Megalith Studio (Spring 2015) in collaboration with Brandon Clifford was an experiment in cross-disciplinarity focusing only on mass, gravity and motion.

Latest publications:

“”Presence and the Architectural Imperative,” Presence: A conversation at Cabaret Voltaire, Zürich, Edited by Jürg Bertold, Philip Ursprung, Mechtild Widrich, pp. 89 – 99

In this article, as part of a conversation, I argue that even though we like to think that presence is above all an ontological question, it is something that can only be described through an architectural frame. Architecture is the arbiter of presence, just as presence is the arbiter of metaphysics.

"Architecture: The Global Imaginary in an Antiglobal World,” Grey Room 61 (Fall 2015) 111-125. This article frames the problematic conflation by some scholars of global history with globalization and. I argue that just because the world global is in the world global history does not mean that it functions in a ‘global’ way or that it bland, uncritical , accommodation to infinite number of ‘locals.’ I argue that the reason global needs to be placed before ‘history of architecture’ is to challenge not only the disciplinary formations architectural history, but also the various false ‘globals’ that claim to speak for the global.

“Eco-Pop” in The Return of Nature: Sustaining Architecture in the Face of Sustainability Edited by Preston Scott Cohen and Erika Naginski (NY: Routledge, 2015), pp. 121-129. This article is a play on the false promises and indeed the faux science of ARUP. If they are in essence making stuff up in hope of making us believe that there is some ‘science’ of Sustainability, then let us go into the theoretical question of illusion. Maybe there is more truth to be told there about architecture’s future role as a modifier of our cultural imaginary.

The Rise of the So-called Premodern. GSAPP Transcripts: The Urgencies of Architectural Theory (Columbia University, 2015), 132-143. A silent revolution has taken place in architectural teaching in the last decade or so. Disciplines like Renaissance Architecture as well as elective courses in anthropology and sociology have slowly disappeared with an increased emphasis on ‘the modern.’ In the resultant backwash we see a new ‘discipline’ emerging, the Premodern, Why is there no criticism and what are the possible implications of this disaster.

"The Shanghai Expo and the Rise of Pop-Arch" Log 31 (Spring/Summer 2014), pp. 145-160. This paper challenges the hegemony of abstraction and points to architectural formations that have not been seen as valid from a theoretical formation. The paper coins the term Arch-Pop to try to focus our attention on a set of buildings that work with literalness as their design methodology.

Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective (Wiley Press, 2013). It is the first textbook in several decades to study the rich history of architectural production beginning from our first social formations some 200,000 years ago. The text moves from first societies to chiefdom cultures leading up to the fateful encounter with colonialism and other forms of modernity. The book is richly illustrated with photographs, custom-made drawings and maps.