Dr Robin Schuldenfrei

Cornelian Lecture 9th May 2023

Robin Schuldenfrei’s research and teaching focuses on the history and theory of modern architecture. She is interested in broad questions—theoretical and practical—of how discourses and practices of design are shaped by a given period’s own cultural and theoretical critique of its media and objects. Her work interrogates the ways in which architecture and its objects relate to other products of society’s design: to works of art, to the production of images, to media, and to technology. She focuses on objects’ subjectivity, materiality, political agency, and social impact and meaning, seeing them as deeply embedded in their period, culture, and intellectual/theoretical climate. To that end, she utilizes both objects and architecture as cultural indices of society at large in order to illustrate the conscious and unconscious perspectives and values of the society that generated them.

Schuldenfrei is committed to advancing broad, interdisciplinary conversations that are crucial for the liberal arts’ grappling with the protracted problems of our time. She is an active member in the UK-based collective Unsettled Subjects which seeks to impact architectural history and architecture as a practice in actively decolonizing teaching, research, and the built environment around us, through the investigation of a broad set of issues and questions concerning identity, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and power. She is also an organizational member of the Migration and Architecture interest group of the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) and has been active in a myriad of efforts in support of Ukrainian architects, historians and urban planners.

Dr Schuldenfrei received her doctorate from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design and previously held positions at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Schuldenfrei has lectured widely, including: Columbia University, ETH Zürich, Harvard University, MIT, Royal College of Art, Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien, University of Edinburgh, University of Hong Kong, and Yale. Her research has been supported by awards from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, SAH / Mellon, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD).

Her on-going speaker series, run through The Courtauld’s Research Forum, is: Modernities: Architecture, Design, Theory. She is also a founding member of the ‘Architecture Cultures’ Research Cluster at The Courtauld.