John V. Maciuika

My work explores modern architecture, art, and design as fields of cultural production. Working across traditional boundaries to bridge architectural history, art history, and history, my research embraces formal aspects of art and design while analyzing these fields within broader political, social, and cultural contexts. Using the built environment as a lens through which to view and analyze history, my approach focuses on material products of art, design, and building, while at the same viewing aesthetic processes against the background of broader historical developments. This approach is typified in such books as Before the Bauhaus: Architecture, Politics, and the German State, 1890-1920 (Cambridge University Press, 2005/2008), and in my current book project while on the Rome Prize fellowship, Infrastructures of Memory: Historical Reconstruction and Cultural Heritage in Central and Eastern Europe.

Link to the 2014 book chapter, “The Historic Preservation Fallacy? Transnational Culture, Urban Identity, and Monumental Architecture in Berlin and Dresden.” Chapter 14 of Jeffry M. Diefendorf and Janet Ward, eds., Transnationalism and the German City. New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2014: 387-421

Andreas Schlueter

Project for expansion of Hohenzollern palace in Berlin, Germany, based on studies of the Palazzo Madama in Rome, 1698.
Photo: Jean Baptiste Broebes, Vues des Palais et Maisons de Paisance de sa Majeste le Roy de Prusse, 1733.