Frederike Lausch
Dr. Frederike Lausch
TU Darmstadt (july 2023)
postdoc project: Self-Education for Survival – Architecture and Sustainability in the Context of Science and Technology Promotion in India in the 1980s
Vita 
Frederike Lausch is an architecture historian, a postdoctoral research associate at the Technical University of Darmstadt, and a co-founder of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture (CCSA). Her research focuses on the dialectic of politics and architectural discourses and theories in the 20th century, including the architectural reception of French Theory (Ph.D. 2019) and the German post-war discourse on architecture under National Socialism (mbooks 2021). Currently, she is researching the Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance to explore how sustainable architectural practices emerged through engagement with development politics in the 1970s and 1980s. She studied architecture at the Bauhaus University and the Middle East Technical University, and obtained her doctoral degree in Art History from Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held fellowships at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (Wüstenrot Foundation) and the University of Arizona (DAAD).
Research focus
Self-Education for Survival – Architecture and Sustainability in the Context of Science and Technology Promotion in India in the 1980s
The research project explores the Communication Centre of Scientific Knowledge for Self-Reliance (CCSK), which was founded in Paris in 1982/83 by Yugoslavian-Slovenian architect Eda Schaur and Hungarian-French architect Yona Friedman and funded by the United Nations University. This will also include the as-yet-largely unexplored work Friedman did for UNESCO in the 1970s and 1980s. The focus is on the extent to which a discourse on sustainable architectural practices as a response to the ecological crisis emerged in the context of transnational projects and engagement with development politics. The subject of the research project is more than 200 self-help manuals with planning, building, and survival knowledge, as well as realized and unrealized building projects of the CCSK in India and Europe. The main thesis of the research project is that the CCSK was concerned with survival practices in non-industrialized countries in order to develop from them a definitely romanticized model of an alternative lifestyle for the industrialized countries, with which the ecological crisis could be better managed.
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