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
  • spatial justice
  • history of architectural materials
  • interdisciplinarity in architecture

Education

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

Current Teaching (2023–24)

  • ARCH 3107: Modern Settlements, Buildings, and Landscapes
  • ARCH 5199: Humanities Seminar
  • 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 an interdisciplinary edited volume that investigates a future after reinforced concrete, a ubiquitous building system that accounts for 8% of global carbon emissions. Other research projects study the relationship between architecture and money in histories of extractive colonialism; interdisciplinarity in architecture, the humanities, and the sciences; and the relationship between information and knowledge in architectural culture. 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.
  • “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 (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2021), 229–245.
  • “Une bibliothèque portative: Le microfilm et son architecture,” Transbordeur 3 (February 2019): 46–59.
  • Co-author with A Community of Inquiry, Keywords; For Further Consideration and Particularly Relevant to Academic Life, Especially as it Concerns Disciplines, Inter-Disciplinary Endeavor, and Modes of Resistance to the Same, ed. D. Graham Burnett, Matthew Rickard, and Jessica Terekhov (Princeton University Press, 2017).

Selected Honours and Awards

  • 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.
  • Doctoral Residency and Collections Research Fellowship, Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2017.
  • Henry Adams Medal of Excellence, American Institute of Architects, 2011.

Scholarly or Professional Memberships