Łukasz Stanek
NOMIS Senior Fellow
Organization
Collegium Helveticum
About Łukasz Stanek
Łukasz Stanek is a NOMIS–Collegium Helveticum Senior Fellow and a professor at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, US. There, he also holds an appointment in the Department of History.
After studying architecture and philosophy in Kraków, Münster and Zurich, and earning a PhD at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands, in 2008, Stanek taught at ETH Zurich, Switzerland, from 2009 to 2011, and at the University of Manchester, UK, from 2012 to 2022. He was a guest professor at Harvard University, US, in 2012 and at the University of Ghana at Legon in 2022. He has been a professor at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning since 2022.
NOMIS–Collegium Helveticum Senior Fellowship period: September 1, 2026 – June 30, 2027
Research focus
Stanek is the author of Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press, 2020). His edited volumes include Team 10 East: Revisionist Architecture in Real Existing Modernism (Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2014) and The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives (Jovis, 2026). He has curated several exhibitions, among them The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture (Architekturmuseum der TUM, Munich, 2024). He cofounded Office Southeast, an urban research consultancy based in Accra, Ghana.
As a NOMIS Senior Fellow, Stanek is studying Ghana’s “ways out” of colonial rule by focusing on the transformation of the country’s architecture and building industry during the late colonial period and the first two decades of independence (1950s–70s). This perspective reveals the negotiation, advances, and setbacks of two core promises of Ghana’s independence: “Africanization,” the replacement of Europeans by Africans in state administration and the economy, and “development,” or competing visions of social and economic modernization. His project is called Ghana Time: Building After Colonialism.
Awards and recognition
Stanek’s book Architecture in Global Socialism won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 2020, among other prizes.
