Agata Nguyen Chuong is advanced researcher at Forensic Architecture and PhD student at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. She leads FA’s research on the Ovaherero and Nama genocide in present-day Namibia. Her research focuses on environmental and colonial violence and evidencing their enduring legacies in support of Indigenous land claims and advocacy.
Ahmad Salah is an architect, researcher, and cultural practitioner whose work focuses on built and natural landscapes and their intersections with cultural and social domains in the Middle East, with a particular focus on infrastructure. He is the co-founder and director of AMASyria—The Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria. Ahmad holds a bachelor’s degree in architecture from Damascus University and a Master’s degree from the University of Edinburgh. He has collaborated on research projects with institutions across Europe and the Middle East, and his work has been supported by the Gwaertler Cultural Foundation, Edinburgh College of Art, and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC).
Akshar Gajjar is an architect and urban & territorial designer and currently a PhD student at EPFL. His research transects architectural material production, ecology, labor and territorial change. He studied architecture and urban design at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, EPFL and ETH Zurich. He is the author of Living together: More-than-Human Ecologies for Architectural Thinking published by Birkhaüser (2025). In his textile- based art practice, he works with regional embroidery to explore questions of archives, identity, sexuality and ecology.
Almut Grunewald is an art historian and member of the scientific staff of gta Archive at ETH Zurich. In 2014, she completed her doctorate at the TU Munich on the subject of "Frederick Kiesler. His sculptures and his open artistic concept". Between 2016–2018 she led the Sigfried Giedion and Carola Giedion-Welcker research project at gta Archive and edited the publication The Giedion World (2019). Together with Sokratis Georgiadis she co-edited Sigfried Giedion’s unfinished book project Die Entstehung des heutigen Menschen (2023). In 2025 she published the book «Cooking Up Dinner Speeches. Ise Gropius in Japan» about Ise Gropius and her impressions of the three-month trip to Japan with her husband Walter Gropius in 1954.
Delany Boutkan (NL, 1993) is a researcher at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where she, amongst other projects, coordinates the International Research Fellowship and has co-organized Collecting Otherwise, a long-term research project on rethinking museum practices of collecting and collaboration. At the institute, she also develops frameworks for publishing, research, and situated knowledge. She is a thesis mentor at the Sandberg Instituut’s Studio for Immediate Spaces and founder of Design Drafts (2022), a publishing network for embodied and experimental writing in design. Her work as a writer, curator, and educator explores how organisational conditions and infrastructures shape what can be remembered, shown, and imagined, often engaging with absences and fragments to ask how curating might intervene in the conditions that structure cultural work.
Emilie Appercé is a Paris – Zürich based architect, editor and founding member of Zurich International, educated both at the EAVT Paris-Est, and Accademia di Architettura, Mendrisio. She teaches at the Chair of Prof. Adam Caruso at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich, as a studio/diploma teaching assistant. Together with architect, writer, and publisher Helen Thomas, and architect Jeahee Shin, she is an editor of womenwritingarchitecture.org. She works independently and collaboratively in various fields of creation, including architecture, design, publishing, exhibitions, writing, and art production.
Faiq Mari is assistant professor at the department of architecture and planning at Birzeit University, Palestine. His work studies the spatiality of Palestinian anticolonial and socio-economic struggle, with a focus on collective labor and property therein. Faiq has practiced architecture and taught at Birzeit and Al-Quds Universities, he is also an editor of the magazine Arab Urbanism. His writings appeared in the Journal of Palestine Studies, Babelwad, and other journals and edited volumes.
Irina Davidovici is an architect and historian. Since 2022, she is the Director of the gta Archive and Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich. She is the author of Forms of Practice. German-Swiss Architecture 1980–2000 (gta 2012 and 2018) and The Autonomy of Theory: Ticino Architecture and Its Critical Reception (gta, 2024). She edited Colquhounery. Alan Colquhoun from Bricolage to Myth (AA, 2015) and co-edited thematic issues for Architectural Theory Review (‘Timber Constructed: Towards an Alternative Material History’, with Laila Seewang, 2021) and OASE (‘Authorship’, with Tom Avermaete, Christoph Grafe and Véronique Patteeuw, 2022). Her latest book Common Grounds: A Comparative History of Early Housing Estates in Europe will be published with Triest Verlag.
Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk is an architectural researcher and designer. She is the founder and creative director of Matri-Archi(tecture) , an association of African and diasporic spatial practitioners exploring entangled histories, realities, and imaginaries through spatial expression. A doctoral fellow at gta, ETH Zürich, her PhD examines how Black foreign women in Zürich have constructed forms of kinship to create liveable geographies in the wake of racial-sexual violence since the 1980s. Khensani works across visual, written, and sonic media to remember untold histories and envision new spatial futures. Her practice frames architecture as a storyteller of place, memory, and possibility. She sustains a practice grounded in the geographies of both Switzerland and South Africa.
Mariam Issoufou is a professor of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zurich, where she leads a design studio and a research team. She founded a project focused on a platform for knowledge restitution and, in her pedagogy, critically examines the racializing processes embedded in the production of space. Previously, she held academic roles as adjunct associate professor of Urban Studies at Brown University and served as the 2021 Aga Khan critic at Harvard Graduate School of Design. In addition to her academic role, she founded the architectural firm Mariam Issoufou Architects, which has offices in Niamey, New York and Zurich.
Martina is a researcher at ETH Zürich with a background in restoration studies. She completed her doctoral dissertation on construction history. She collaborates also at the Professorship for History and Theory of Architecture (ETHZ), and she is currently pursuing studies in Applied Information and Data Science. Since 2022, her research has pivoted toward anti-imperialist methodologies for knowledge restitution, and she has been actively involved in the Chair for Architectural Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zurich, where she develops teaching materials and research contents. Her work bridges technological tools with theoretical archival approaches, emphasizing intersectional sustainability and the decolonization of architectural knowledge at the core of the chair’s activities. She is also deepening her expertise in applied information and data science, while working on digital infrastructures for architecture research contents in different teams.
Mirma Al Wareh is an architect, artist, researcher, and Co-founder of the Archive of Modern Architecture in Syria (AMASyria). She is currently a peer researcher at the Institute of Development Studies and the University of Stirling. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Damascus University and a Diploma in Cinematic Arts from the General Directorate of Cinema in Damascus, and is presently pursuing an MSc in Urban Development Planning at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London. Mirma’s written and artistic practice explores the intersections of politics, society, architecture, and urban life in both modern and contemporary Syria. She recently authored The Physical Manifestation of City Dynamics in the Cinema Theatres of Damascus as part of a fellowship with Ettijahat – Independent Culture. She is also a current recipient of the Chevening Scholarship and the Arab Fund for Arts and Culture (AFAC) Creative Writing Grant.
Nwola Uduku is Head of School at Liverpool School of Architecture and Co-director of the AHUWA Research Centre, which focuses on Architectural History and Urbanism in Western Africa. She is also involved with Docomomo International, and the Shared heritage Africa project, She co-edited the recently published Modernism in Africa, Birkhauser, 2024), has written on School Design in Africa (Uduku, 2017). She has recently contributed to ‘Who are Godwin and Hopwood” (Tosland, 2024) and The Architecture, Empire and Trade, (Jackson, et al 2025). Also through her membership of the University of Manchester-based African Cities Research Consortium, ACRC she regularly comments on urbanism and social infrastructure issues in Africa. Her most recent publication is the chapter, Learning Spaces in Africa: From Missionaries to Development Hubs in Learning Ecologies in Architecture, ArchiTangle, London, 2025.
Paola De Martin (b. 1965) is from Zurich and Belluno (Italy). She is a former textile designer and a design historian. She has lectured in history and sociology of cultural production at the PHZH, the ZHdK and the HSLU. She completed her doctorate at the Gta-Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich in 2020. Her dissertation was published in 2022 under the title Give us a break! Arbeitermilieu und Designszene im Aufbruch (Zurich: Diaphanes). Paola De Martin is co-curator of the ethnographic-artistic, anti-racist collective Schwarzenbach-Komplex and president of the NGO TESORO. Her recent focus is on classism in Swiss architecture, in relation to migration and human rights violation. In 2024, her interdisciplinary approach was honored by the Federal Office of Culture BAK with the Swiss Grand Prix Design. In the same year, she received the international Diaspora Prize of the Associazione Bellunesi nel Mondo ABM.
Rami Msallam is an architect, researcher, and spatial investigator based in Zurich. He is trained as an architect at ETH Zürich and graduated with distinction from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London. Currently, he is a member of the research team led by Prof. Mariam Issoufou at the Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability, ETH Zürich.
Based in Berlin, Robin Coenen is an information designer working at the intersection of design, science, technology, and visual anthropology. After studying Visual Communication at FH Aachen and Zurich University of the Arts, he led the Digital Media Department at Atelier Intégral Ruedi Baur in Paris before pursuing graduate studies in Data Visualization at Parsons School of Design in New York.In 2020, Robin co-founded the design studio Visual Intelligence together with sociologist and designer Danielle Rosales. The studio explores the visual articulation of complex artistic, social, and technological systems. In 2025, he co-founded conQrete Tech, a computer-vision startup bridging artificial intelligence and information design.Since 2021, he has been a research associate in the Class for Information Design at the University of the Arts Berlin. His academic and artistic research focuses on mapping, data visualization, and digital methodologies in design research as tools for knowledge production, transformation, and dialogue.
Robin Hartanto Honggare is Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, National University of Singapore. He works at the intersection of architecture, environmental humanities, and commodity histories. His current book project investigates the extensive network of buildings that enabled commodity production in the Dutch East Indies.Robin received his PhD in Architecture and MS in critical and curatorial practices from Columbia University. He also holds a BArch from Universitas Indonesia. His research has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the American-Indonesian Cultural & Educational Foundation, and Nieuwe Instituut.
Roland Meyer has been DIZH Bridge Professor for Digital Cultures and Arts at the University of Zurich and the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) since July 2024. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Collaborative Research Centre «Virtual Lifeworlds» at the Ruhr University Bochum, where he worked on virtual image archives.Roland Meyer’s work as a media and visual culture researcher focuses on networked image cultures. He is particularly interested in the new aesthetic and operational functions of digital images under the conditions of global digital platforms, ubiquitous computing, mobile media and big visual data. He has published on the history and present of facial recognition, practices of image forensics, navigation in augmented spaces, and generative AI and synthetic image worlds.
Sabine Sträuli is an art and architecture historian, graduating from the University of Zurich. She has been working at the gta Archive since 2015, where she has contributed to several archive-based publications and exhibitions. Her research includes studies on female architects, institutional histories and architecture exhibitions. At the gta Archive she is responsible for administration, communication and public outreach, she is part of the SNF-project team on "The Architecture Competition as Political Instrument” (2025–2029), and together with Archive director Irina Davidovici she advances the Archiving Absence initiative.
Sara Frikech is an architect and historian working at the intersection of water, architecture, and landscape history in colonial and postcolonial contexts. She holds a PhD in Landscape and Urban Studies from ETH Zürich, where her dissertation, Hydrological Landscapes of Empire: The Making of Colonial Meknès (1845–1956), examined how colonial water infrastructures reshaped urban and rural environments in French Morocco. Her research explores the entanglements of environmental control, infrastructure, and everyday forms of resistance. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at ETH Zürich, where her work focuses on colonial archival inheritance, digital restitution, and architectural historiography. Sara Frikech is also the co-founder and editor-in-chief of DELUS, an award-winning journal for landscape and urban studies based at ETH Zürich.
Setareh Noorani is an architect, researcher and curator at Nieuwe Instituut whose practice focuses on feminist, decolonial, non-institutional, and more-than-human perspectives in the way we build, remember and change cities. Setareh argues for alternative futures that foreground underexposed voices and forms of collectivity, translating research into exhibitions, publications, and public programmes.
Stefanie Korrel (1995) is an architectural historian and programme maker, working as a curator at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. She conducts research and acquisitions for the National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, and is responsible for the Sonneveld House museum. Her focus is on bringing to light underexposed stories and individuals in architectural history through projects like the Asterisk*. She is working on a new collection policy and making the collection accessible to a wide audience, both within and outside the institute. Together with local (architectural) initiatives, she positions architectural history as a source of inspiration for current spatial challenges.
V. Mitch McEwen is an Assistant Professor at Princeton’s School of Architecture and principal of Harlem-based design practice Atelier Office. At Princeton, McEwen directs the architecture and technology research group Black Box, exploring biomaterials and algorithmic processes in design and construction. She is one of ten co-founders of the Black Reconstruction Collective. McEwen’s design work has been commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Architecture Biennale US Pavilion, as well as awarded grants from the Graham Foundation, Knight Foundation, and New York State Council on the Arts.
Wayne Modest is Director of Content of Wereldmuseum, with locations in Amsterdam, Leiden, and Rotterdam. He is also professor (by special appointment) of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam. A cultural studies scholar by training, Modest works at the intersection of material culture, memory and heritage studies, with a strong focus on colonialism and its afterlives in Europe and the Caribbean. His most recent publications include the co-edited publications, Matters of Belonging: Ethnographic Museums in A Changing Europe (Sidestone Publications, 2019, together with Nick Thomas, et al), and Victorian Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2018, together with Tim Barringer). He is currently working on several publication projects including Museum Temporalities (with Peter Pels, forthcoming Routledge) and Curating the Colonial (with Chiara de Cesari, forthcoming Routledge). Modest has (co)curated several exhibitions, most recently, the Kingston Biennial (2022) entitled Pressure (together with David Scott and Nicole Smythe-Johnshon) and What We Forget (2019) with artists Alana Jelinek, Rajkamal Kahlon, Servet Kocyigit, and Randa Maroufi, an exhibition that challenged dominant, forgetful representations of Europe that erase the role of Europe’s colonial past in shaping our contemporary world.
Zeynep Çelik Alexander is an historian of architecture from the eighteenth century up to the present. Çelik Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (University of Chicago Press, 2017), the recipient of the 2019 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award. She co-edited, with John May (Harvard University), Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Daniel Abramson (Boston University) and Michael Osman (UCLA) for Aggregate, Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). She is currently completing a book titled Imperial Data, an account of storehouses of information in the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Zoya Masoud works at the intersection of postcolonial studies and post-foundational theory. Her research focuses on marginalised individuals within dominant discourses around identity and heritage. Currently, she is conducting her post-doctoral project, “Irrestitutable. Inquiries into Hauntings of Absent Cultural Heritage.” She received her PhD from the Technical University Berlin, titled “Dislocated. Heritage Construction through Experience of Loss in Aleppo.” Her first book, based on her PhD thesis, is scheduled for publication in 2026. She has worked at several institutions, including the German Archaeological Institute, the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art, BTU Cottbus, Forum Transregionale Studien, and the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. She has been teaching on heritage preservation, restitution, art, and archival collections, as well as commemoration and violence, since 2021. Zoya studied architecture and urban planning in Damascus, Hamburg, and Dar Es Salaam.