Stanek awarded NOMIS Senior Fellowship
Łukasz Stanek, professor of architecture at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, has been awarded a NOMIS Senior Fellowship at the Collegium Helveticum, the Swiss Institute for Advanced Study, in Zurich. The fellowship is supported by ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Zurich University of the Arts.
The NOMIS Senior Fellowship recognizes “distinguished and engaging researchers who are internationally recognized beyond their area of specialization” and seeks to “attract internationally leading researchers who inspire colleagues both within and beyond their own disciplines.”
During his year-long fellowship, Stanek will finalize his third monograph, Ghana Time: Building After Colonialism. The book examines how architecture, urban planning, and the construction and building materials industries created the material infrastructure of Ghana’s independence. It also explores how this infrastructure became a medium for assessing, challenging, and sometimes modifying the promises of independence.
A historian of architecture, planning, and urbanism, Stanek has single-authored two previous architectural monographs. His first book, Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory, was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2011. He later published Architecture in Global Socialism. Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War, with Princeton University Press in 2020. The latter won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain (2020), among other prizes. Earlier this year, JOVIS published The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives, a new volume of articles edited by Stanek.
Stanek’s scholarship examines worldwide urbanization processes since World War II beyond colonial encounters with Western Europe and the impact of Western-dominated globalization. In 2024, he co-curated The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture, an exhibition at the Architectural Museum in Munich that explored the definition and effects of architectural gifts: buildings designed and constructed to be handed over and received without the expectation of reciprocation.
