Mireille Roddier

Mireille Roddier is an associate professor of Architecture and teaches in both the design and history/theory curriculum. She also holds a joint appointment with Women's Studies, and a faculty affiliation at the Institute for Research on Women & Gender.

Her research focuses on urban representation through the lens of class and gender. Since exploring the architecture of working-class women's civic spaces in Lavoirs: Washhouses of Rural France (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003), she has studied the traces of modernization and its discontent onto the contemporary city, with a heavy focus on Paris and Detroit. Borrowing criticism developed in other fields (theatre, film, photography, ethnography), and informed by interdisciplinary fellowships (Institute for the Humanities, Institute for Critical Social Inquiry), her work currently centers on the relationship between urban narratives, the production of the public realm, belonging, and appropriation. Her critical writings have appeared in the Architectural Review, Places Journal, Volume, MONU, New Writing, etc. and she regularly lectures on women's representation of cities, on the aestheticization of urban decay, and on preservation as city branding. Recent graduate seminars include New Babylon Redux (2013-15) on the Situationist critique of the city, and Medusa in the Metro: urban representation and the gendered gaze (2018-).

Her ongoing interest in the mechanisms and politics of representation has also fueled her design work. The projects of Mitnick-Roddier, her shared practice with Keith Mitnick, have received numerous awards, including the Architecture League of New York’s Young Architects Prize and Architectural Record’s 2005 Design Vanguard, and been widely published and exhibited (Log, Mark Magazine, Storefront, SFMoMA, etc).