Dr. Maja Lorbek, Visiting Fellowship 2023/24
Biography
I am an architectural historian with an interdisciplinary background. I have a PhD in architecture from TU Wien. I have worked as a lecturer at TU Wien, Department of Housing and Design, and as a project coordinator at the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Research (IOER) in Dresden. I am currently the Principal Investigator of the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) funded research project "Transnational School Construction" at the Department of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna. I am a coordinator of the working group "Residential Buildings and Architectural Design" within the European Network for Housing Research (ENHR). My research interests lie at the intersection of the history and co-production of the built environment and material cultures. My recent studies have focused on international organizations and post-war school-building programs.
Visiting fellowship February 2024
Motivation
My motivation for applying for the fellowship is my interest in exploring mobilities and exchanges in the history of education and architecture, and in assessing the impact of international organizations on national educational reforms and school construction. My research stay at the Institute of Contemporary History will allow me to further examine the archival documents I have already obtained and to supplement these materials with primary and secondary sources from the INZ. The focus will be on the influence of the OECD in the later stages of Yugoslav school reform.
Due to my extensive experience in grant writing, I am interested in joint applications for international funding for research on the history of education, internationalism, and material culture. I am also interested in co-organizing conferences either in Vienna or Ljubljana and applying for event funding.
Selected Recent Publications
Lorbek, Maja. The Hallenschule. Decoding Transnational Standards in the Austrian Setting’. In Geometrien des Lebens: Materialien zu Viktor Hufnagl (1922–2007), edited by Elise Feiersinger, Gabriele Kaiser, Gabriele Ruff, and Österreichische Gesellschaft für Architektur, 19–26. Zürich: Park Books, 2022.
Lorbek, Maja. Schulen weiterbauen. Strategische Entwicklung von Schulgebäudebeständen. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2020.
Lorbek, Maja. School Renovation Programme in Vienna Exploring the Actions of Relevant Social Groups and the Potential for Interpretative Flexibility’. In Vom Wert des Weiterbauens, edited by Eva Maria Froschauer, Werner Lorenz, Luise Rellensmann, and Albrecht Wiesener, 165–76. De Gruyter, 2020. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035622249-012.
Lorbek, Maja. Idealizations of the Kleinhaus: On the Typology of the Small Single-Family House in Germany, 1920s–1960s. Architectural Histories 6, no. 1 (25 October 2018) https://doi.org/10.5334/ah.243
