Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister
Lise Meitner Group Leader
Anna-Maria Meister directs the Lise Meitner Research Group "Coded Objects" at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) - Max Planck Institute, and is professor for architecture theory and co-director of the saai archive at KIT Karlsruhe. Meister’s work focuses on processes of design and the design of processes, specifically their political, social, and aesthetic consequences; she also investigates the materiality of knowledge systems and their constructions. She holds a joint PhD degree in the History and Theory of Architecture and the Council of the Humanities from Princeton University as well as degrees in architecture from Columbia University and the TU Munich. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, the Graham Foundation, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, DAAD; 2025 she was selected as Henriette-Herz-Scout for the Humboldt Foundation. As licensed architect and historian she works across medial divides and has curated exhibitions and produced installations at the Venice Biennial 2014, the Lisbon Triennial in 2013, and at Princeton University in 2024. Her research was published in journals like Britisch Journal for the History of Science, Architectural Histories, Journal for the History of Knowledge, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, Harvard Design Magazine, Volume, Uncube; in 2024, she was runner-up for "EAHN Best Article Award for Architectural Histories for the volumes 2022 and 2023". Most recently she co-edited the international research project Radical Pedagogies and the eponymous book (MIT Press 2022), the interdisciplinary volumes Entangled Temporalities (2023) and Are You a Model? (2024); currently, she is editing a double volume titled Coded/Objects and a completing monograph on standardization as societal projection in 20th century Germany.
- History of Modern Architecture
- History of Bureaucracy
- History of Science and Technology
- History of Standardization, Automation, Rationalization
- Structures of Power, Governance and Resistance
- Making and Un-Making of Knowledge
- Form as Epistemic Category
- Material Histories and New Materialism
- Pedagogies and Forms of Education in Architecture
- Coded Objects
- Fragile Objects, Coded Knowledge (The Architectural Archive)
- CCSA (Center for Critical Studies in Architecture https://criticalarchitecture.org/
- Wirkungsforschung in Architektur und Städtebau (DFG WAS Netzwerk) https://www.was-netzwerk.de/
BOOKS
- Meister, Anna-Maria, Teresa Fankhänel, Anna Luise Schubert, Lisa Beißwanger, Christina Clausen, Chris Dähne, Christiane Fülscher (eds). Are You a Model?. Berlin: Jovis Verlag (2024). https://jovis.de/en/book/9783986120726
- Hsiung, Hansun, Laetitia Lenel, Anna-Maria Meister. "Entangled Temporalities". Special Issue of the Journal of the History of Knowledge (2023). https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/issue/view/839
- Colomina, Beatriz, Ignacio Gonzalez Galan, Evangelos Kotsioris, Anna-Maria Meister. Radical Pedagogies. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2022). https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543385/radical-pedagogies/
ARTICLES AND BOOK CHAPTERS
- Hansun Hsiung, Laetitia Lenel, and Anna‐Maria Meister, 'Introduction' in Journal for the History of Knowledge, 4 (2023), 9–32. DOI: 10.55283/jhk.17017 https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/article/view/17017
- Meister, Anna-Maria. "Chernobyl’s Palimpsestic Shelters" in Journal for the History of Knowledge, 4 (2023), 165–192. DOI: 10.55283/jhk.12570 https://journalhistoryknowledge.org/article/view/12570
- Meister, Anna-Maria. "Coded Objects: The Forms of Proto-Algorithmic Thinking" in Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 1 November 2023; 53 (5): 518–528. https://online.ucpress.edu/hsns/article/53/5/518/198194/Coded-ObjectsThe-Forms-of-Proto-Algorithmic
- Meister, Anna-Maria and Mechthild Ebert. “The Powers of Metadata: Stories of Fragile Knowledge Constructions” in Architecture Archives of the Future. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference of the Jaap Bakema Study Center, November 2023: 201–208.
- Meister, Anna-Maria. "Processing Models, Modelling Processes for the HfG Ulm ca. 1952," in Designing the Computational Image, Imagining Computational Design. Edited by Daniel Cardoso Llach, Theodora Vardouli. Oro Editions (2023): 80–83.
- Meister, Anna-Maria. "'Housewives and Architects': Marie-Elisabeth Lüders' Management of the New Architecture from Pot Lid to Siedlung" in From Ration Cards to Refugee Camps: Architecture, Bureaucracy, and the Global State of Emergency during and after WWI, special issue of Architecture Histories 10 (2022): 1-24. Edited by S.E. Eisterer and Erin Sassin-Eckhold. https://journal.eahn.org/article/id/8286/
- Meister, Anna-Maria. "Ernst Neufert's 'Lebensgestaltungslehre': Formatting Life beyond the Built" in Learning by the Book, special issue of BJHS Themes 5 (2020): 167–85. Edited by A. Creager, M. Grote, E. Leong. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/bjhs-themes/article/ernst-neuferts-lebensgestaltungslehre-formatting-life-beyond-the-built/6626A6B18EDEB920F223AD37C393D4A4
- Co-Director of the SAAI | Archiv für Architektur und Ingenieurbau https://www.saai.kit.edu/
- Professorship Architectuer Theory at KIT https://at.ekut.kit.edu/
- Executive Board Member for the Housing Cooperative “Das große kleine Haus” https://dasgrossekleinehaus.de/