Spyridon Papapetros
Assistant Professor, History and Theory of Architecture
Diploma Architect, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
AA Graduate Diploma, History and Theory, Architectural Association, Graduate School, London
Ph.D., Theory and Historiography of Art and Architecture, University of California, Berkeley
Spyros Papapetros, who joined the faculty in 2003, is an art and architectural historian and theorist whose
work focuses on the historiography of art and architecture, the intersections between architecture and the
visual arts, as well as, the relationship between architecture, psychoanalysis and the history of
psychological aesthetics. A former Fulbright scholar, he is also the recipient of a scholarship from the
Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley and two postdoctoral Research Fellowships from the Getty
Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. During 2002-2003,
he was an associate fellow at the Warburg Institute in London where he researched the unpublished manuscripts
of Aby Warburg. In the spring of 2006 he was a visiting Scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles
contributing to the theme of "The Persistence of Antiquity." In 2007-2008, he returned to the Getty Research
Institute as a Getty Scholar contributing to the yearly theme "Change." He is the author of On the Animation
of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (forthcoming by the University of Chicago Press,
2011) and the editor of Space as Membrane by Siegfried Ebeling (London: AA Publications, 2010). Recent
published articles include "World Ornament: The Legacy of Gottfried Semper's Essay on Adornment" in RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics 57/58 (Harvard Univ. Press, December 2010), "On the Biology of the Inorganic:
Crystallography and discourses of latent life in the art and architectural historiography of the early
twentieth century" in Biocentrism and Modernism edited by Oliver Botar and I. Wünsche (Surrey: Ashgate, 2011),
'The Cell of Des Esseintes" in Pidgin 10 (SOA: April 2011), "Architecture and Regression: On the
Pre/post/erous Histories of the Modern Movement" The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Volume 8, (January 2011),
"The Directionality of Hair" in Cabinet, 40 (December 2010), "Building from Behind: Architecture and the
Aesthetics of Dorsality" in AREA: Rivista di Architettura, 112 (September/October 2010), "MICRO/MACRO:
Architecture, Cosmology, and the Real World" in Perspecta Vol. 42, The Real (MIT Pres, April 2010), "Space,
Time, and Monstrosity—A (Retrospective) User's Guide" in Monsterpieces of 2000 (New York: Oro Editions, 2010),
"The Sculptor as Historian" in Josiah McElheny (New York: Skira/Rizzoli, 2010), "An Ornamented Inventory of
Microcosmic Shifts: Notes on Hans Hildebrandt's book project Der Schmuck, 1936-37" in The Getty Research
Journal (March 2009), and "Aby Warburg as Reader of Gottfried Semper: Reflections on the Cosmic Character of
Ornament" in Elective Affinities: Testing Word and Image Relationships (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009). Forthcoming
publications include articles in JAE, RES, and the French anthropological journal Gradhiva, as well as book
chapters in two edited anthologies: Architects' Journeys: Expanding the Field (New York: GSAPP Books,
forthcoming 2011), and Warburgs Denkraum: Formen, Motive, Materialien ed. by M. Treml a. o. (Munich: Fink,
forthcoming 2011). Papapetros is also the co-editor of a forthcoming book based on the symposium Retracing
the Expanded Field that took place in the Princeton School of Architecture in 2007 on the intersections
between architecture and the visual arts during the last three decades. He is currently completing a second
personal book project under the general title World Ornament on the historiography of architectural
ornamentation and bodily adornment from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century.
