Claire Zimmerman

Claire Zimmerman teaches the history and theory of constructed enviroments, 18th century to the present. Courses focus on mass production in architecture and the built environment, architectural photography, carceral architecture, an economic architectural history, and intersections of class, race, and ethnicity in the industrialization of the world. Her current book explores the history of industrial architecture and infrastructure in the twentieth century, and the comparative absence of such a history from professional and academic thought. Life near Detroit has brought the concrete and steel frame factory to a position of central interest in her current and future projects. Newer projects focus on agrarian infrastructure (the industrialization of territory), animal architecture, and postwar avant-garde production by architecture couples. 

Zimmerman received her PhD from the City University of New York, her Master of Architecture from Harvard University, and her Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania.

Collaborations:

Black Washtenaw County, Humanities Collaboratory, University of Michigan

Equity in Architectural Education Consortium (multi-institutional)

Lines of Property, University of Michigan and University of Rochester Institute for the Humanities (with Peter Christensen and Lisa Haber-Thomson)

Architecture against Democracy (with Reinhold Martin)

In Press:

Detroit Moscow Detroit: an Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (MIT, 2023) with Jean-Louis Cohen and Christina Crawford

Published:

Grey Room 71: The Costs of Architecture

Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (Minnesota, 2014)

Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern (Yale, 2010)

Current Courses:

• Animal Architecture
• Sacrificial Subjects: Industrialization and its People, 1848-1945 (ARCH 823/ HA 774)
• Architecture in Capitalism (HA 215)
• Then and Now: Architecture and the Historical Imagination (ARCH 313)
• Architectures of Incarceration (HA 194)