In Conversation: Eve Blau | Harvard GSD & Eric Mumford | WashU
ABOUT EVE BLAU
Eve Blau is an architectural and urban historian. She is a professor of the history and theory of urban form and design in the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University where she is Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and former Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Before coming to Harvard, she was Curator of Exhibition and Publications at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Blau has published extensively on modern architecture, urbanism, and the productive intersection between media and urban spatial form. A principal concern of her research, teaching, and curatorial practice is with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing socio-political, environmental, and technological conditions. The purpose is to understand how these conditions are reorganizing built environments in ways that challenge the fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban. A major focus is on cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world. Her books include The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (1999/2014); Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe (2000); Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (2007); Baku: Oil and Urbanism (2018). In 2015 Blau was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize of the Republic of Austria for her innovative scholarship and contributions to the history of social movements. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians.
ABOUT ERIC MUMFORD
Eric P. Mumford is the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture and Urban Design in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also holds courtesy appointments in the departments of Art History & Archaeology and History. His academic research and teaching focuses on the history of architectural design within various midcentury metropolitan and environmental contexts, many of them related to the history of CIAM, the International Congresses for Modern Architecture.
His books include Design Agendas: modern architecture in St. Louis, 1930s-70s (Mildred Lane Kemper Museum, Washington University in St. Louis), the catalogue for a fall 2024 exhibition which he co-curated. He is also the author of several widely known works of architectural history, including a textbook, Designing the modern city: urbanism since 1850 (Yale University Press, 2018), as well as The CIAM Discourse on Urbanism, 1928-1960 (MIT Press, 2000); Defining Urban Design: CIAM architects and the formation of a discipline, 1937-69 (Yale University Press, 2009); and Modern Architecture in St. Louis (Washington University, 2004), and an earlier museum catalogue, Ando and Le Corbusier, volume 2 (Alphawood Foundation, Chicago, 2021).
He currently an Advisor to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Humanity’s Urban Future committee (cifar.ca) and a member of the Genealogies of Urban Design Network, Rome (gudesign.org).
