Eve Blau

Eve Blau is Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design and Director of Research at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, a cross-Harvard initiative supported by funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which brings together scholars and resources from across Harvard to foster innovative approaches to the study of cities and urbanization processes, and develop new collaborative research practices that bring together scholarship, design, and media around the study of urban environments. She is also the former director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.

She teaches core and elective courses on Urban Design, including the Urban Design Proseminar: History, Theory, Practice; Cities by Design; Urban Form: Transition as Condition. In recent years she has taught a series of research seminars: Berlin as Laboratory; Baku: Oil and Urbanism; Mapping Cultural Space Across Eurasia. Blau has written extensively on modern architecture and urbanism, and has curated numerous exhibitions. Before coming to Harvard, Blau was Curator of Exhibitions and Publications at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, and Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.

Blau’s research engages a range of issues in urban and architectural history and theory and the productive intersection between urban spatial form and media. The underlying concern is with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical, environmental, and technological conditions. The purpose is to understand how these conditions are reorganizing built environments in ways that challenge the fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban. A major focus is on cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world that have experienced large-scale adjustments to new forms of polity, systemic institutional change, and economic reorganization.