Lucia Allais
Assistant Professor, History and Theory of Architecture
B.S.E., Princeton University
M.Arch., Harvard University
Ph.D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Lucia Allais is an architectural historian and theorist who specializes in the
international political and intellectual history of architecture, urbanism, and
preservation in the 20th Century. She joined the Society of Fellows in 2008 and
will begin a position as assistant professor at the School of Architecture in September 2011. While
at Princeton, she is working to turn her dissertation, Will to War, Will to Art:
Cultural Internationalism and the Modernist Aesthetics of Monuments 1932-1964,
into a book. This work chronicles the emergence of a theory of modern monumentality
from international bureaucracies at mid-century, and maps the spatial politics of
their cultural patronage since. Allais has received fellowships from the National
Gallery of Art, the Graham Foundation, the Gunzburg Center for European Studies at
Harvard, the ACLS, and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. She has worked in design firms
in Europe and the US; most recently in the architectural think-tank OMA-AMO and the
multidisciplinary studio 2x4. Her writings cover a range of periods and milieus, and
include "Ordering the Orders: Claude Perrault's Ordonnance and the Eastern Colonnade
of the Louvre," in Future Anterior (Winter 2005), "The Evolution Clause" in Log 5
(Summer 2005), a translation of Michel Foucault's "Le Corps Utopique" in Caroline
Jones, ed., Sensorium, (MIT Press, 2006), and an entry on architect Ulrich Franzen
in the exhibition catalog Beyond the Harvard Box (Harvard GSD, 2006). Forthcoming
essays in Volume, in the edited volume Aggregate, and in Perspecta address,
respectively, issues in contemporary international heritage law, patterns of monument
movement during the Cold War, and the institutional origins of postmodern architectural
theory. Allais teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture, as well as
interdisciplinary courses in the Humanities.
