Lucia Allais

Lucia Allais is an architectural historian and critic whose work addresses the relation between architecture, technology and politics in the modern period on the global stage. Her first book, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, 2018) described how “the monument” acquired a new valence as global building type in the mid-twentieth century, when international organizations (from the League of Nations, to the Allied Military Government, to Unesco) designed plans to protect and salvage famous buildings from episodes of massive destruction, including through maps of monuments “not to be bombed” during World War II. She is at work on a second monograph, tentatively titled Topographic Modernism.

Allais has published many articles on related themes. As a historian of institutions she has investigated design collaborations that were intended as models for political or disciplinary exchange: “The Real and the Theoretical, 1968” (Perspecta, 2010); “Architecture and Mediocracy at Unesco House” (Marcel Breuer, 2018); “When Louis Pasteur taught at the Beaux-Arts” (Grey Room, 2023).

Her writings on architectural heritage have outlined a lineage of thought wherein political or aesthetic representation is supposedly based on the density and integrity of materials: “The Design of the Nubian Desert (Governing by Design, 2012); “Integrities” (Grey Room, 2013); “Alois Riegl: Mood for Modernists” (Grey Room, 2020); “Plasticities: Architects and the Genius of Materials” (Technoscape, 2022).

Allais’s work on technical media addresses the history of design methods that make buildings into instruments for manipulating time and perception: “Rendering” (Design Technics, 2019); “Amplified Humanity and the Architectural Criminal” (Eflux, 2016); “Screen Graspers” (Inscriptions, 2022).

Most recently, Allais has co-edited After Concrete (Birkhauser, 2026). Based on research she co-directed with Forrest Meggers about the history of the “carbonation equation” in reinforced concrete, the volume gathers researchers from the sciences and technology, as well as the arts and humanities, to address hitherto segmented insights on reinforced concrete’s impact on energy regimes and the built environment.