Mark Jarzombek
Mark Jarzombek, Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture
Diplom Architekt. ETH: 1980, Ph.D. MIT: 1986
From 1987 to 1994, Jarzombek taught at Cornell University. He came to MIT in 1995. He was Director of History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art, Department of Architecture, MIT, (1996-2007); Associate Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT (2007 – 2014); and Interim Dean, School of Architecture and Planning, MIT (2014 - 2015).
Jarzombek was co-founder with Vikramāditya Prakāsh of the Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative, (funded by a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation) [2013- 2022]
He is also co-founder with Vikramāditya Prakāsh: Office of (Un)Certainty Research [2018- ]
Jarzombek was a CASVA fellow (1985), Post-doctoral Resident Fellow at the J. Paul Getty Center for the History of Humanities and Art, Santa Monica, California (1986), a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (1993), at the Canadian Center for Architecture (2001) and at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute (2005) and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome (2018). He was a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians Board Member (1993 -1996) and serves or served on the board of several journals and academic institutions including the SSRC and the Buell Foundation, and was a member of the 2011 Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) "Excellence Initiative."
Jarzombek works on a wide range of topics – both historical and theoretical. He is one of the country’s leading advocates for global history and has published several books and articles on that topic, including the ground-breaking textbook entitled A Global History of Architecture (Wiley Press, 2006) with co-author Vikramāditya Prakash and with the noted illustrator Francis D.K. Ching. He is the sole author of Architecture of First Societies: A Global Perspective (Wiley Press, 2013), which is a sensitive synthesis of first society architecture through time and includes custom-made drawings, maps and photographs. The book builds on the latest research in archeological and anthropological knowledge while at the same time challenging some of their received perspectives.
He also recently published The Long Millennium: Affluence, Architecture and its Dark Matter Economy (Routledge, 2023) that takes an innovative look at the first millennium CE, luxury trade and up-stream / down stream economies. It argues that the modern global economy which tends to favor the economies coming out of the metropole underestimates the importance of economies coming from the forests, deserts and shores from whence most of the luxury commodities were derived.
Jarzombek's other works focuses on issues that he calls, modernity from the tangent. His most recent book, Architecture Constructed: Notes on a Discipline (Bloomsbury, 2023), studies the frictions divided between the architect and contractor, positioning it within the problematic of Eurocentrism. Jarzombek also recently published a book that interrogates the digital/global imaginaries that shape our lives: Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age (University of Minnesota Press, 2016). His Urban Heterology: Dresden and the Dialectics of Post-Traumatic History takes on the issue of how erasure and rebuilding in Dresden force us to rethink the conventions of urban history. The issue is also at the core of the book Krzysztof Wodiczko, City of Refuge: A 9/11 Memorial, which Jarzombek edited with Mechtild Widrich.
Jarzombek’s ground-breaking work on global architecture history was highlighted by a 3.5 million dollar grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that Jarzombek received with co-PI, Vikramāditya Prakash (University of Washington, Seattle), to create a new scholarly entity called Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC). Promoting the development and exchange of teaching materials for architectural history education across the globe, the collaborative provides awards to members and their teams to develop new lecture material from global perspectives.
Through EdX, Jarzombek taught the first ever MOOC (mass open online course) on the history of architecture with thousands of participants, world-wide. It is based on the undergraduate course that he teaches 4.605: A Global History of Architecture.
Jarzombek's and Prakash's other joint venture is OUR: Office of (Un)certainty Research, which is dedicated to challenging architecture's epistemological and design capacities to bring the conversation back into a world of immersive ambiguities. Architecture (Un)certainty Lab [A(U)L], is the research wing of O(U)R. Projects from O(U)R have been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (2022) and at the Space Time, Existence Exhibition: Venice ("Tirtha: a Recomposing Temple Complex", 2022; and "Kishkindha NY" 2023). O(U)R's project House Deconstructed was published by Actar Press, 2023.
Jarzombek has been the principle advisor or reader for over 75 dissertations and an equally large number of SMarchS degrees.
Jarzombek has organized several major international conferences on topics such as Holocaust Memorials, Architecture and Cultural Studies, and East European Architecture. He was the founding faculty editor of Thresholds, an annual peer-reviewed journal produced by the Department of Architecture. The content of which features leading scholars and practitioners from the fields of architecture, art, and cultural studies.
1986 Doctoral Dissertation: Leon Baptista Alberti: The Rhetoric of Cultural Criticism, revised and published as On Leon Battista Alberti: His Literary and Aesthetic Theories.
