Liane Lefaivre

Liane Lefaivre is Professor and Chair of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna Austria. She has been a visiting Fellow at MIT and the National University of Singapore and is a researcher at the Technical University of Delft. Her writing and research relates to two formative modern periods: that is from the Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment and from the late 19th century to the present. She is also a Principle, Integration Playgrounds (PIP) activist.

Publications

Awards

Her Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. Re-Configuring the Architectural Body in the Early Italian Renaissance (Cambridge, MA., The M.I.T. Press: 1997) which won:

1. The Association of American Publishers Award for Best New Scholarly/Professional Book of 1997
2. The American association of Architects annual Award for Best Book (in history) for 1997
3. The Association of American University Publishers Award (in the category of illustrated books) for 1997

Her Architecture in Europe since 1960 was a New York Times Book of the Year in 1995 and won the American Association of Architects Annual Award for best book in criticism.

Collaborations

She has also published, with the financial assistance of the Graham Foundation, a documentary history of the modernization of architecture from the early Renaissance to the end of the 18th century, entitled The Origins of Modern Architecture (in Dutch, De Oorsprong van de moderne architectuur, Nijmegen, SUN: 1984, now in its second printing); Architectural Thinking (Het architectonisch denken, Nijmegen,SUN: 1991). She has also published Classical Architecture. She co authored the book Problems of Judgement in Programmatic Analysis in Architecture (1974). The Poetics of Order (Cambridge, MA.,The MIT Press: 1986. Now in its 7th printing and translated into French, Spanish, German and Japanese). She has published The Emergence of the Modern (Routledge, 2003) and Critical Regionalism (Prestel, 2003), all in collaboration with Alexander Tzonis.

She collaborated with her long-time partner Alex Tzonis in introducing to the field the concept of Critical Regionalism (1981) and Populism (1976) to architecture. They were the first to introduce the notion of strangemaking to architecture (1986). She also introduced the concept of Dirty Realism to architecture through many articles, starting in 1989. She has published and lectured widely on all. Among her books are Architecture in North America since 1960 (Boston, Little, Brown; London, Thames and Hudson: 1995), Architecture in Europe since 1968 (London, Thames and Hudson; New York, Rizzoli: 1993) now in paperback (1997), Movement and Structure in the Work of Santiago Calatrava (Basel, Birkhaüser: 1996), again, in collaboration with Alex Tzonis. She also co-edited with him Tropical Architecture; Critical Regionalism in an Age of Globalization (Wiley, 2001) and published Aldo van Eyck Humanist Rebel (010, 1999), Critical Regionalism (Munich, Prestel, 2003), and Ground-Up City; Play as a Design Tool (Rotterdam, 010, 2006, in collaboration with Dollab).

Articles

Her articles have appeared in Architecture, Architectural Record, Archithese, Korean Architect, A+U, Wonen/TABK, the magazine of the Architecture School of Tsinghua University in Beijing, Arquitectura & Vivienda, Arquitectura Viva, Forum, Design Book Review, Casabella, AMC (Architecture, Mouvement, Continuite), La revue du dix-huitieme siecle, Daedalos, A.A.Files, the Harvard Architecture Review, The Architect’s Newspaper, the New Village Journal, Pin-Up, Harvard Design Magazine and Der Standard.

Recent

Her most recent books are The Child, the City and the Power of Play, or the PIP Principle (Tsinghua University, 2010) and, co-authored with Alexander Tzonis, Architecture of Regionalism in the Global Age. Hills and Valleys in the Flat World (Routledge, 2012).

Her forthcoming book, with Reaktion Books and the University of Chicago Press, is Modern Architectures in Austria (2014).

Work

Academic

She has lectured at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, Columbia University, MIT, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, the Politecnico of Milan, the University of La Sapienza in Rome, the Technion in Haifa, Cambridge University, Institut Francais d’Architecture in Paris, the ACSA Meeting in Havana Cuba, The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the University of California in San Diego, Woodbury College in Los Angeles, the University of Michigan, Betzalel Academy in Jerusalem, the Technical University of Berlin, at the First Shenzhen Biennale in 2007, Tongji University in Shanghai, Tsinghua University in Beijing, the Central Academy of Art in Beijing, the Technical University of Istanbul, the Academy of Art in Hangzhou, the Federal University of Sao Paulo, the Federal University of Rio, and the Federal University of Brasilia, the College de France, McGill University, the Lee Kuan Yew Center for Innovative Cities, the Singapore Institute of Technology and Design, Shenkar Academy in Tel Aviv, WIZO Academy in Haifa, Clemson University, Yale University and Southeast University in Nanjing.

Public works

She is a member of the board of The Journal of Architecture (Royal Society of Architects, London), The Architect’s Newspaper (New York) and the Cahiers de la Recherche (French Ministry of Culture) has been on the boards of Design Book Review, and Archithese and Architecture (New York)

She curated the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam based on her original research into Aldo van Eyck’s playgrounds, edited the exhibition catalogue Aldo Van Eyck, The Playgrounds and the City (Summer 2002). She has curated an exhibition and edited a catalogue of the work of Santiago Calatrava entitled Santiago Calatrava. Like a Bird at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in collaboration with the Naturhistorisches Museum in Vienna, the first exhibition to bring the two museums together (Spring 2003). She curated designs of playgrounds by her students at the University of Applied Art at the nadaLocal gallery in Vienna in May 2010. In October 2010, she curated with Professor Li Kaisheng of the Chinese Academy of Art in Hangzhou the work of their joint students for a post-traumatic (the earthquake in Sechuan province of 2008) urban design plan based on playgrounds in Dujiangyuan at the Shanghai Art Biennale in October 2010. She contributed to the catalogue of the US pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012. She is preparing an exhibition on the PIP Principle and Integration Playgrounds in the 15th district of Vienna funded by the municipality of Vienna.