Lucia Allais

Editor, Discipline

Lucia Allais is an Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Lucia Allais is an architectural historian and critic who studies the design, reception, and transformation of buildings in the modern period and on the global stage. Her interests include: the history of internationalism and institutions; intellectual history; the sciences of materiality; architects’ involvement in political culture and governance; and architecture’s contribution to epistemologies of history, historiography, and time. Her first book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (University of Chicago Press, 2018) addressed systematic attempts to salvage monuments from the destructions of the mid-twentieth century (including by the so-called Monuments Men during World War II), showing how these projects laid the spatial ground for the collection of sites known as “World Heritage.”