Łukasz Stanek (May 2023)
Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. His research, including his last book Architecture in Global Socialism (Princeton University Press, 2020), discusses architectural exchanges between Eastern European socialist countries and newly independent countries, such as Ghana and Nigeria, during the Cold War.
Stanek’s current research project connects Nigerian, Polish, and British archives of drawings and other survey materials focused on vernacular architecture in Nigeria, carried out between the 1950s and the 1970s by a Nigerian-Polish team led by Zbigniew Dmochowski (1903-82), a Polish architect, historian, and the first director of the Museum of Traditional Nigerian Architecture at Jos, Nigeria. Dmochowski’s study was based on survey methods which he had employed as part of the 1930s “internal colonisation” of then-eastern territories of Poland, today Belarus and Ukraine. By contrast, he and his team claimed that the application of these methods in independent Nigeria aimed at the decolonisation of architecture in the country. Stanek scrutinizes this argument by studying the impact of Dmochowski and his Nigerian collaborators, such as educator Ekundayo Adeyinka Adeyemi, on architectural pedagogy, preservation, design, and research in Nigeria since the 1960s, including the work of the polymath Demas Nwoko. This research, developed in conversation with partners from Rivers State University, Port-Harcourt, Nigeria connects epistemic traditions situated in Poland and Nigeria: two locations often perceived as “peripheries” of Western centres of knowledge production. In this way, it contributes to a more multifaceted, counter-hegemonic, and antagonistic history of 20th century architecture.
Stanek’s residency at The Cosmic House and the resulting essay commission take place in the context the Jencks Foundation’s first research theme ‘isms and ‘wasms: 1980 in parallax’ that takes the year 1980 as its starting point. In 1980 the first ever Venice Architecture Biennale entitled The Presence of the Past famously announced Post-Modernism as the international mainstream of architecture. It proposed a new canon that was to be more inclusive and polyphonic, and sought to embrace a diversity of narratives. Charles Jencks’ contribution to the Biennale When ‘wasms became ‘isms set out to map the various streams and traditions of Post-Modern Architecture through exploring the edges, the eccentric, the bizarre and the outsider cultures of architecture beyond the mainstream. Yet despite these ideals, none of the case studies and architects presented at the Biennale went beyond the European and North-American context. Looking back – once again – in order to look forward, this research theme reconsiders the Post-Modern canon from the critical distance of 43 years to reinvigorate the pluralism suggested by the Biennale and Charles.
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Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. 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). The latter won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2020), the Royal Institute of British Architects President’s Award for History & Theory Research (2020), and the First Book Prize of the International Planning History Society (2022).
His edited volumes include Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment by Henri Lefebvre (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Team 10 East. Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014) and Urban Revolution Now. Henri Lefebvre in Urban Research and Architecture (Ashgate, 2014, with Ákos Moravánszky and Christian Schmid). Previously Stanek taught at the Swiss Federal University of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland, and the University of Manchester, UK, and he was guest professor at Harvard University GSD, USA, and the University of Ghana at Legon in Accra, Ghana. He was a fellow at Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (Washington DC, USA), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montreal, Canada), and the Institute d’Urbanisme (Paris, France).