Marianna Charitonidou

Dr. Ing. Marianna Charitonidou is Architect Engineer & Urban Planner, Historian & Theorist of Architecture and Urbanism, Expert in Sustainable Environmental Design, Curator & Urban Sociologist. Currently, she is Principal Investigator and Postdoctoral Researcher in Architecture & Urban Planning at Athens School of Fine Arts and National Technical University of Athens. She is registered Architect Engineer at the Technical Chamber of Greece since October 2010 (no: 127002) and the Founder and Principal of Think Through Design Architectural, Urban and Landscape Design Studio. Her monograph Drawing and Experiencing Architecture: The Evolving Significance of City’s Inhabitants in the 20th Century investigates how the concepts of the observer and user in architecture and urbanism transformed throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. On 11 February 2022, in the framework of the International Day of Women and Girls in Science 2022, she was selected by ETH Zurich among the women role models conducting research in Science. She is member of the Editorial Board of InScience and member of the Senior Advisory Board of City Space Architecture, which is partner of UN-Habitat. She is an active member of Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA), Association d’histoire de l’architecture (AHA), Associazione Italiana di Storia Urbana (AISU), DOCOMOMO International, European Architectural History Network (EAHN), and European Association of Urban History (EAUH) among other associations, networks and societies. Moreover, she is qualified as lecturer (Maître de conférences) by section 18 of the National Council of Universities (C.N.U.) in France concerning research and teaching in architecture (its theories and practices), applied arts, visual arts, performing arts, epistemology of artistic teaching, aesthetics, musicology, music, art science, and as lecturer (Maître de conférences) by section 22 of the National Council of Universities (C.N.U.) in France concerning research and teaching in history and civilizations, history of modern worlds history of the contemporary world art history music history.

At the Faculty of Art Theory and History of Athens School of Fine arts, she is the Principal Investigator of the research project entitled Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s Post-war Reconstruction Agendas in Greece and in Italy: Centralising and Decentralising Political Apparatus. As Lecturer and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, she conducted a postdoctoral project entitled The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision, which she completed in August 2021. There, she taught “Fundamentals of the History and Theory of Architecture I”, “Fundamentals of the History and Theory of Architecture II”, and the seminar “The City Represented: The View from the Car”. She also curated the exhibition The View from the Car: Autopia as a New Perceptual Regime at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich.

She has extensive postdoctoral research experience and apart from the postdoctoral research project Constantinos A. Doxiadis and Adriano Olivetti’s Post-war Reconstruction Agendas in Greece and in Italy: Centralising and Decentralising Political Apparatus”, which she is currently leading at Athens School of Fine Arts, and the postdoctoral research project The Travelling Architect’s Eye: Photography and the Automobile Vision, which she conducted at the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich (2019-2021), she also completed a third postdoctoral research project entitled The Fictional Addressee of Architecture as a Device for Exploring Post-colonial Culture: The Transformations of the Helleno-centric Approaches (2018-2022) at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens. The completed research was presented on 6 July 2022.

In September 2018, she was awarded a Doctoral Degree all’unanimità from the National Technical University of Athens for her PhD dissertation The Relationship between Interpretation and Elaboration of Architectural Form: Investigating the Mutations of Architecture’s Scope (jury: Jean-Louis Cohen, Bernard Tschumi, George Parmenidis, Pippo Ciorra, Constantinos Moraitis, Kostas Tsiambaos, Panayotis Tournikiotis). In her PhD dissertation, she examined the mutations of the modes of representation in contemporary architecture in relation to the transformation of the status of the addressee of architecture. Her PhD dissertation was based on archival research in various archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles (Aldo Rossi papers, Reyner Banham Papers etc.), the Fondation Le Corbusier in Paris, the Library of Congress in Washington DC., and the Museum of Modern Art of New York (Ludwig Mies van der Rohe papers), Avery Library’s Department of Drawings & Archives at Columbia University in New York, and Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo in Rome (Aldo Rossi papers) among other institutes. She was a Visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (invited by Prof. Bernard Tschumi, 2016-2017 & 2017-2018), the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University (invited by Prof. Jean-Louis Cohen, 2014-2015 & 2016-2017), the École française de Rome (2016-2017 & 2017-2018), the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) (Doctoral Students Grant Program 2018), and the Getty Research Institute (GRI). Her research projects have been supported by Columbia University, the Getty Research Institute, the Académie Française, the Cité Universitaire Internationale de Paris, the State Scholarships Foundation (IKY), the Université Paris Nanterre, Leventis Foundation, Stavros Niarchos Foundation and ETH Zürich Foundation.

Apart from her PhD Degree, she also holds an MPhil Degree in History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism (Inter-Departmental Postgraduate Program “Design, Space, Culture”) from the School of Architectural Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (2013) (MPhil Dissertation Project: From Semiology to Deconstruction: Metaphysics and Subject), an MSc Degree in Sustainable Environmental Design from the Architectural Association in London (2011) (MSc Dissertation Project: Sustainable Housing Design in Mykonos: Vernacular vs. Contemporary), and a Master Degree in Architectural Engineering from the Department of Architectural Engineering of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (2010) (Final Design Project: Design Routes: Crossing the Section). She was also awarded an Erasmus Scholarship that gave her the opportunity to attend the Master in Architecture programme of the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais (2007-2008). She has taught at various schools in Europe – especially in Zurich, Paris and Greece – including the Department of Architecture of ETH Zurich, the Department of Architectural Engineering of the University of Ioannina, the School of Architectural Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-la-Villette and the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles.

She has presented her research at many international conferences (more than 95) and has published more than 90 publications focusing on architecture and urbanism. Among her publications are: the monograph Drawing and Experiencing Architecture: The Evolving Significance of City’s Inhabitants in the 20th Century (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2022) “Housing Programs for the Poor in Addis Ababa: Urban Commons as a Bridge between Spatial and Social”, in the Journal of Urban History, 48(6) (2022), “Mies van der Rohe’s Zeitwille: Baukunst between Universality and Individuality”, in Architecture and Culture, 10(2) (2022), “Ugliness in architecture in the Australian, American, British and Italian milieus: Subtopia between the 1950s and the 1970s”, in City, Territory and Architecture, 9(20) (2022), “Denise Scott Brown’s active socioplastics and urban sociology: from Learning from West End to Learning from Levittown”, in Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 10(1) (2022), “Travel to Greece and Polychromy in the 19th Century: Mutations of Ideals of Beauty and Greek Antiquities”, in Heritage, 5(2) (2022), “Le Corbusier’s ineffable space and synchronism: From architecture as clear syntax to architecture as succession of events”, in Arts, 11(2)(2022), “Frank Gehry’s Non-trivial Drawings as Gestures: Drawdlings and a Kinaesthetic Approach to Architecture”, in the Journal of Visual Art Practice, 21(2) (2022), “Italian Neorealist and New Migrant films as dispositifs of alterity: How borgatari and popolane challenge the stereotypes of nationhood and womanhood?“, in Studies in European Cinema (2022), “Urban scale digital twins in data-driven society: “Challenging digital universalism in urban planning decision-making”, in the International Journal of Architectural Computing, 20(2) (2022), “The 1968 effects and civic responsibility in architecture and urban planning in the USA and Italy: Challenging ‘nuova dimensione’ and ‘urban renewal’”, in Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 9(1) (2021), “Vers une écosophie des pratiques architecturales et urbaines”, in Ligeia, Dossiers sur l’Art, 2 (2021), “E-Road Network and Urbanization: A Reinterpretation of the Trans-European Petroleumscape”, in Urban, Planning and Transport Research, 9(1) (2021), “Revisiting Giancarlo De Carlo’s Participatory Design Approach: From the Representation of Designers to the Representation of Users”, in Heritage, 4(2) (2021), “Fantaisies architecturales chez Iakov Tchernikhov : Surpasser la “mimesis” à travers la “phantasia” comme agent du progrès”, in Nouvelle revue d’esthétique, 27 (2021), “Autopia as new perceptual regime: mobilized gaze and architectural design”, in City, Territory and Architecture, 8(5) (2021), “Gender and Migrant Roles in Italian Neorealist and New Migrant Films: Cinema as an Apparatus of Reconfiguration of National Identity and ‘Otherness’”, in Humanities, 10(2) (2021), “Takis Zenetos’s Electronic Urbanism and Tele-Activities: Minimizing Transportation as Social Aspiration”, in Urban Science, 5(1) (2021), “Frank Gehry’s Self-Twisting Uninterrupted Line: Gesture-Drawings as Indexes”, in Arts, 10(1) (2021), “Exhibitions in France as Symbolic Domination: Images of Postmodernism and Cultural Field in the 1980s”, in Arts, 10(1) (2021), “Interactive art as reflective experience: Imagineers and ultra-technologists as interaction designers”, in Visual Resources: An international journal on images and their uses, 36(4) (2020), “László Moholy-Nagy and Alvar Aalto’s Connections: Between Biotechnik and Umwelt”, in Enquiry The ARCC Journal for Architectural Research, 17(1) (2020), “Simultaneously Space and Event: Bernard Tschumi’s Conception of Architecture”, in ARENA Journal of Architectural Research, 5(1) (2020), “Architecture’s Addressees: Drawing as Investigating Device”, in villardjournal, 2 (2020), “Aldo Rossi’s Transatlantic Cross-fertilization: American ‘Urban Facts’ and Reinvention of Design Methods”, in Aldo Rossi, Perspectives from the World. Theory, Teaching, Design & Legacy, edited by Marco Bovati et al (Padova: Il Poligrafo, Biblioteca di Architettura series, 2020), “Alison and Peter Smithson and their Travels to Greece: The Search for an Open-ended Morphology”, Viaggi e Viste. Mediterraneo e modernità, edited by Stamatina Kousidi (Firenze: Altralinea edizioni/Momenti di architettura moderna, 2020), “Gottfried Semper face au Crystal Palace Le Stoffwechsel ou l’osmose entre arts décoratifs et architecture/Gottfried Semper’s Perplexity Before the Crystal Palace: Stoffwechsel as Osmosis between Decorative Objects and Architecture”, in Faces, 77 (2020), “The Immediacy of Urban Reality in Postwar Italy: Between Neorealism and Tendenza’s Instrumentalization of Ugliness”, in Architecture and Ugliness: Anti-Aesthetics and the Ugly in Postmodern Architecture, edited by Wouter Van Acker and Thomas Mical (London; New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2020), “Music as a Reservoir of Thought’s Materialization: Between Metastaseis and Modulor”, in Aberrant Nuptials: Deleuze and Artistic Research 2, edited by Paulo de Assis and Paolo Giudici (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2019), “Le récit autobiographique d’Aldo Rossi: Introspection ou rétrospection?”, in L’Homme & la Société, 208 (2018), “Between Urban Renewal and Nuova Dimensione: The 68 Effects vis-à-vis the Real”, in Histories of Postwar Architecture, 2 (2018), “Archives of Architecture Museums: The Effects of Digitisation”, in OASE, 99 (2017), “Réinventer la posture historique : les débats théoriques à propos de la comparaison et des transferts”, in Espaces et Sociétés, 167 (2016), “L’AUA entre le Team 10 et le postmodernisme”, in Une architecture de l’engagement: l’AUA 1960-1985, edited by Jean-Louis Cohen ανδ Vanessa Grossman (Paris: La Découverte/Cité de l’architecture et du patrimoine, 2015).