Lucia Allais

Lucia Allais is a historian of architecture in the modern period. Her work focuses on architecture’s role in the institutionalization of culture, over the course of the long 20th Century, on the global stage. She is interested in architecture in the expanded sense: the work of architects designing new spaces, the reception and transformation of existing buildings, and design itself as a cultural and intellectual field.

Her first book, Designs of Destruction (Chicago: 2018) traces the invention of the “cultural monument” as a global building type from the 1930s to the 1970s, showing how international schemes for the protection of monuments during war and development became essential to the creation of a new cultural branch of world government. The book is based on deep archival findings, from the League of Nations’ involvement in the reconstruction of the Parthenon, to the work of the “monuments men” during the bombings of World War II, to the salvage of the Abu Simbel temples by UNESCO in the 1960s.

Allais has also written on the history of postwar architectural theory, and she writes regularly about contemporary design. Recent and forthcoming writings include: an essay-length history of architectural rendering (in Design Technics, Minnesota: 2019); a translation and introduction, with Andrei Pop, of Alois Riegl’s “Mood as the Content of Modern Art” (in Grey Room 80, Summer 2020), and an essay, with Forrest Meggers, on the carbonation equation for reinforced concrete as indicator of the dynamics of anthropogenic change (in Evidence, Narrative and Writing Architectural History, forthcoming 2021).

Allais has received a number of grants and fellowships for her work, including from the Radcliffe Institute, the Graham Foundation, and CASVA; her work has appeared in journals including Grey Room, October, Perspecta, Log, eFlux, Volume, Art Journal, Journal of Architecture, and Future Anterior.

Allais received her BSE from Princeton, her M. Arch from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her PhD in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from MIT. Before joining Columbia in 2019, Allais spent 10 years at Princeton University, first as a fellow in the Princeton University Society of Fellows, then as an assistant and associate professor in the School of Architecture, and a director of IHUM, the Interdisciplinary Humanities PhD program. Allais is a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, and an editor of the journal Grey Room.