Lucia Allais

Lucia Allais is an architectural historian of the modern period. She is Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, and Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.
Allais's interests include the history of internationalism and institutions; architecture's relation to political culture and global governance; the history of architectural materials, and the epistemology of time. Allais’s first book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2018) described how a new definition of “the monument” arose from various plans to protect and salvage famous building from destruction in the middle of the 20th Century. This includes the making of lists and maps of monuments “not to be bombed” by American art historians during World War II, the decolonization of museums the global South at the hands of organizations from the League of Nations to UNESCO, and the salvage of massive building complexes, such as the temples of Abu Simbel, by global multidisciplinary consortia.
Allais has published a number of essays on related themes. “Architecture and Mediocracy at Unesco House” (in Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions, ed. Massey and Berdgoll, Lars Mueller, 2018) describes the fraught collaborative design of the UNESCO headquarter in Paris. “The Real and the Theoretical, 1968” (in Perspecta 42, 2010) uncovers a never-realized plan for a “Harlem school” of architecture produced by Peter Eisenman of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in collaboration with the New York Urban League. “Rendering: On Experience and Experiments” (in Design Technics, ed. May and Çelik Alexander, Minnesota: 2021) is an essay-length history of rendering informed by changing theories of experience, informed by histories of media and technology. She recently co-authored, with Andrei Pop, an introduction to three translations of texts by Alois Riegl, “Mood for Modernists” (in Grey Room 80: Winter 2020), and, with Forrest Meggers, “Concrete is One Hundred Years Old: The Carbonation Equation and Narratives of Anthropocenic Change” forthcoming in the volume Narrative, Evidence and Writing Architectural History (Pittsburg: 2022)

Allais earned her B.S.E. from Princeton, her M.Arch from Harvard, and her PhD from MIT. Before joining Columbia, Allais spent ten years at Princeton University, first as a Behrman-Cotsen Fellow in the Society of Fellows, then as an Assistant Professor, then Associate Professor with tenure, in the School of Architecture.

Allais is a founding member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, and an editor of the journal Grey Room.