Alexander Bala

Alexander Bala, PhD, is a Polish-American architectural historian and theorist who is currently a Lecturer in Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. He teaches courses on the history of architecture and urban form.

Bala’s research focuses on twentieth-century architectural and artistic avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe and the United States during the interwar and postwar periods. His scholarly approach borrows from philosophy, literary theory, and a broader history of ideas related to Formalism, Structuralism, Poststructuralism, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, and Marxism.

Bala was a Fulbright research fellow in Warsaw, Poland, during the 2018-19 academic year, a Visegrád research fellow at the Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives of the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary, during the 2024 Spring semester, and an American Councils Title VIII research fellow in Warsaw during the 2024-25 academic year. His writings have appeared in edited volumes by Routledge, as well as in journals and online platforms such as Fabrications, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architektúra & urbanizmus, H-SHERA, Places, and Drawing Matter.

Bala holds a bachelor of architecture from Virginia Tech, and master and doctoral degrees in architectural history from the University of Texas at Austin. The subject of his doctoral dissertation was the development of the Open Form tradition of the Polish architect Oskar Hansen during the 1950s, with an emphasis on its intellectual sources within the context of postwar humanism.