School of Architecture

Faculty of Architecture and Planning

Michael Faciejew

Assistant Professor

faciejew
School of Architecture

Email: michael.faciejew@dal.ca
Phone: 902-494-1165
Fax: 902-423-6672
Mailing Address: 
5410 Spring Garden Road
Halifax, NS, Canada B3H 4R2
 
Research Topics:
  • architecture and colonialism
  • history of media, information, technology, infrastructure
  • global architectural history
  • environmental history
  • spatial justice
  • history/theory of architectural materials

Education

  • BSc (Arch), McGill University
  • MArch, McGill University
  • MA, Princeton University
  • PhD, Princeton University

Current Teaching (2025–26)

  • ARCH 3002: B2 Design
  • ARCH 3107: Modern Settlements, Buildings, and Landscapes
  • ARCH 5104: Urban Systems
  • ARCH 9014: MArch Thesis 1
  • ARCH 9015: MArch Thesis 2

Research Interests

Michael Faciejew is a historian and theorist of the global built environment. He researches the intersecting histories of architecture, media, technology, and colonialism since 1800. He is currently at work on his first book project, which examines the architectural and imperial transformations that forged a modern culture of information in Europe between 1890 and 1960. He is also developing the interdisciplinary edited volume After Concrete: Rethinking the Dynamics of a Material, which investigates the history and future of reinforced concrete through its relationship to global environmental change (Birkhäuser, forthcoming 2026). He is the recipient of a SSHRC Insight Development Grant (IDG) for the research project “Terraqueous Architectures in Settler Colonial Canada” (2025–2027), which studies key structures that have negotiated land and water, and thus settler colonial politics, since the 1867 Confederation. He recently co-edited a special issue of Architecture Beyond Europe (ABE Journal) themed “Transactional Spaces: Currency in the Imperial Built Environment,” which looks at how architecture participated in the production of a global colonial economy. Other research projects deepen the study of related questions, including the relationship between architecture, money, and banking in histories of extractive colonialism; the built environments of early-twentieth-century wireless technology; and the relationship between information and knowledge in architectural culture. He is a former Associate Editor (Reviews) and Editorial Board Member of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). He was previously a postdoctoral associate at Yale University, where he coordinated the interdisciplinary Mellon Sawyer Seminar "The Order of Multitudes: Atlas, Encyclopedia, Museum." He has taught history and design at Princeton University, Pratt Institute, the University of Toronto, and Yale University.

Selected Publications

  • Knowledge Technics: Architecture, Information, and Imperial Worldmaking. Manuscript in preparation.
  • After Concrete: Rethinking the Dynamics of a Material (co-editor with Lucia Allais and Forrest Meggers). Forthcoming, Birkhäuser, 2026.
  • “Wasteland.” In Timely Reflections on Spatial Justice, edited by Rana Abughannam. Forthcoming 2025.
  • “Transactional Spaces: Architecture and Currency in the Imperial Built Environment” (co-author with Rixt Woudstra), ABE Journal, no. 24 (2024). https://doi.org/10.4000/13934
  • “Articulated Flatness: Document Culture and Modernism in the Mundaneum and Beyond,” Grey Room 82 (Winter 2021): 30–63.
  • “Homo Documentator: Architecture and the Political Economy of Information,” Thresholds 49 (2021): 48–59.
  • “Renovating Modernity: The 'Architect-Organizer' and the Politics of Humanism in Interwar France.” In Die Multiple Moderne / The Multiple Modernity, Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Baugeschichte 2, ed. Klaus Tragbar (Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021), 229–245.
  • “Une bibliothèque portative: Le microfilm et son architecture,” Transbordeur 3 (February 2019): 46–59.

Selected Honours and Awards

  • Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development Grant (SSHRC IDG). Project: “Terraqueous Architectures in Settler Colonial Canada,” 2025–2027 ($63,185).
  • Mitacs Globalink Research Intern Grant, Mitacs, Summer 2025 ($11,500).
  • Barr Ferree Publication Fund Grant, Princeton University, 2023.
  • Exchange Grant, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, 2023
  • Scott Opler Emerging Scholar Fellowship, Society of Architectural Historians Conference Fellowship, 2022.
  • Carter Manny Award Citation of Special Recognition, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, 2019.
  • Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), 2013–17.

Scholarly or Professional Memberships