Lidia Klein

Faculty Research Connections Profile

Lidia Klein is an Assistant Professor in Architectural History, specializing in global contemporary architecture. Her current research centers on the political dimensions of postmodern architecture outside the Global North, specifically in South America and Eastern Europe. She earned her Ph.D. in 2018 from the Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Students (AAHVS) at Duke University, defending her dissertation, “Political Postmodernisms: Architecture in Chile and Poland, 1970–1990” (director: Annabel Wharton). She also earned a Ph.D. from the Department of Art History at the University of Warsaw in Poland in 2013, defending her dissertation, “Living Architectures: Biological Analogies in Architecture at the End of the Twentieth Century” (director: Waldemar Baraniewski). While finishing her first Ph.D., she was awarded a Fulbright Junior Advanced Research Grant to the AAHVS Department at Duke during the 2010–2011 academic year. She also worked as an Assistant Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 2012–2013. During the Spring semester of 2016, she was a Visiting Assistant in Research at the Yale School of Architecture.

As of 2018, Klein is the author, editor, or co-editor of five published books and numerous articles on contemporary architecture. Her book projects include the single-author study, Living Architectures: Biological Analogies in Architecture of the End of the 20th Century (Warsaw: Fundacja Kultury Miejsca, 2014) [in Polish], and edited books, Transformation: Polish Art, Design and Architecture After 1989 (Warsaw: Fundacja Kultury Miejsca, 2017) [in Polish], Polish Postmodernism: Architecture and Urbanism (Warsaw: 40000 Malarzy, 2013) [in Polish], and Making the walls quake as if they were dilating with the secret knowledge of great powers (Warsaw: Zacheta, 2012), co-edited with Michal Libera. She has also authored essays that appear in various edited books, such as “From Post-Political to Agonistic,” published in Architecture Against the Post-Political, an anthology of texts edited by Nadir Lahiji (Routledge, 2014) and most recently, “One Size Fits All: Appropriating Postmodernism in the Architecture of Late Socialist Poland,” an essay co-authored by Alicja Gzowska and forthcoming in Second World Postmodernisms, edited by Vladimir Kulić (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Explore HER recent work