In Conversation: Eve Blau | Harvard GSD & Eric Mumford | WashU
ABOUT EVE BLAU
Eve Blau is Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design at the GSD. Blau is co-director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, a cross-Harvard program that brings together scholars and resources from across the University to foster innovative approaches to the study of cities and urbanization processes. She is also the former director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies. Before coming to Harvard, Blau was Curator of Exhibitions and Publications at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Blau’s research engages a range of issues in urban and architectural history and theory and the productive intersection between urban spatial form and media. The underlying concern is with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical, 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 that have experienced large-scale adjustments to new forms of polity, systemic institutional change, and economic reorganization.
Blau has written extensively on modern architecture and urbanism, and has curated numerous exhibitions, including Urban Intermedia: City, Archive, Narrative (2018), an exploration of new visual and digital methods for acquiring and producing knowledge about cities. In addition to her work on urbanism, Blau has published widely on issues of representation and intersections between art, media, architecture and urbanism.
In 2022, Blau was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; in 2018 she was named a fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians; in 2015, Blau was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize [Victor Adler-Staatspreis für Geschichte sozialer Bewegungen] by the Republic of Austria for her contributions to the history of social movements and for the innovative methods of her scholarship.
ABOUT ERIC MUMFORD
Eric P. Mumford is the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also holds courtesy appointments in art history and archaeology, as well as 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 of Modern Architecture.
His books include “Design Agendas: Modern Architecture in St. Louis, 1930s-70s,” (Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum) 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); “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); “Modern Architecture in St. Louis” (Washington University, 2004); and an earlier museum catalogue, “Ando and Le Corbusier, volume 2” (Alphawood Foundation, Chicago, 2021).
He was co-principal investigator with Mónica Rivera on “Edges of Privacy,” a housing research project in 2021-24, supported by a McDonnell International Scholars Academy Global Incubator Seed Grant. He currently an advisor to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Humanity’s Urban Future committee (cifar.ca) and a steering committee member of the Genealogies of Urban Design Network (gudesign.org).