Lukasz Stanek

Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Manchester, UK. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the SAH GB and the RIBA President’s Award for History & Theory Research. Besides Manchester, Stanek taught at the ETH Zurich, Harvard University GSD, and the University of Michigan.

My research focuses on architecture and built environment since the post-war period, straddling two main themes.

First, departing from the work of Henri Lefebvre (1901-91), I am exploring critical debates in architectural culture since 1968 and their consequences for research, practice, and discourse of architecture until today. On this topic, I published the book Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011), and I edited Lefebvre’s 1973 unpublished book about architecture, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). For more information, see here.

My second research field is focused on architecture and planning in socialist countries in a global perspective. On this topic, I have recently edited the book Team 10 East. Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw/ Chicago University Press, 2014). In particular, I am working on a long-term project focused on the export of architecture and urbanism from European socialist countries to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East during the Cold War, and its impact on current processes of urbanization in the Global South. This research has been communicated by means of exhibitions, edited volumes, journal articles, and the book Postmodernism Is Almost All Right (Bc-Zmiana Foundation, Warsaw, 2012). More information can be found here.

I am happy to receive inquiries from students interested in pursuing research related to my research interests:

- Architecture and social research: Critical debates, empirical applications, and political conditions since 1960s until today. Learning from Henri Lefebvre, neo-Marxism, CERFI, institutional analysis, post-structuralism, regulation theory, Science and Technology Studies. Materialist epistemologies of architecture.

- Global modernism: Rethinking, modification, questioning, and transformation of modernism as the techno-cultural mode of global urbanization since the 1960s. Alternative globalization (“mondialization”) of architecture and planning: socialist, Third-World, Non-Aligned, OPEC. History of architecture as a part of global labor history and its methodological challenges: distributed authorship, global division of labor, network analysis, “planetary urbanization”.

- Architecture and urban planning in socialism and after: a comparative perspective on Central Europe; knowledge transfer from socialist countries to the Global South and its consequences for global conditions of urbanization today; non-capitalist economies of architecture; “real existing modernism”; urban landscapes of post-socialism.

2011
Mohammed Bagader
The Evolution of the Built-heritage Conservation Policies and Strategies in Saudi Arabia between 1970 and 2014
Completed in 2016

2011
Basim Sulaiman Al Atni
Changing Urban Landscapes in Saudi Arabian Cities: A New Framework for Assessing Sustainable Urban Development
Completed in 2016

2013
Jeremy Lecomte
The Transmodern City. Lagos, Urban Projects and The Politics of Space (1880-2014)
Completed in 2016

2015
Garrett Wolf
Demodernization and Recovery: Hybrid Urban Form and Culture in Samarkand and Tashkent, Uzbekistan Since the Fall of the Soviet Union
Expected completion in 2020

2015
Brett Mommer-steeg
Variations of a Building: an Ontological Politics of Architecture
Completed in 2020

2017
David Mountain
The modernism of neoliberalism: amenity and leisure in the London Docklands Development Corporation
Expected completion in 2021

2018
Adam Przywara
Rubble Europe: Trans-National History of Rubble Utilisation in the Immediate Post- War Period
Expected completion in 2021

2018
Ksenia Litvienko

GIPROTEATR: Theatre Architecture and the Building of the Transnational Soviet Bloc, 1970s-80s

Expected completion in 2021