Prof. Dr. Anna-Maria Meister
Lise Meitner Group Leader
Anna-Maria Meister is an architect and architecture historian. She is Lise Meitner Group Leader at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) - Max Planck Institute and professor for architecture theory at KIT Karlsruhe, where she also co-directs the saai archive. Her work, situated between histories of architecture and histories of technology, focuses on the entanglements of processes of design and the design of processes, specifically regarding their political, social, and aesthetic consequences. She holds a PhD from Princeton University, a Master's degree from Columbia University and a diploma from TUM, and was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin. She is currently working on a book manuscript titled Formatting Objects, Forming Values: The Paper Architectures of 20th Century Germany, and has co-edited a special issue for the Journal of the History of Knowledge on entangled temporalities that investigates time as embedded in matter (2023), as well as the collection Are You a Model?, a volume on the architectural model as epistemological process (2024). She is co-curator of the international research project “Radical Pedagogies” and co-editor of the eponymous book (MIT Press, 2022).
- 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/