Daniela Fabricius

Daniela Fabricius is a historian and theorist of architecture whose work takes an interdisciplinary approach to the political, intellectual, and aesthetic histories of 20th-century architecture. Her research and teaching interests include postwar German architecture and politics, histories of technology and digital design, feminist histories and theories, and architectural responses to social and historical reparations.

Professor Fabricius teaches core courses in the Master of Architecture and Advanced Architectural Design programs within the Department of Architecture. These courses cover topics such as 19th and 20th-century architectural history, contemporary architectural theory, and contemporary aesthetic theory. Her undergraduate and graduate seminars include “Architecture and Labor,” “Spatial Reparations: Material and Territorial Practices of Justice,” and “Making Space: Feminism and Architecture.”

In addition, Professor Fabricius advises PhD students in the History and Theory of Architecture. Before joining the standing faculty at the Weitzman School of Design, she taught at the Pratt Institute, Cornell University, and the School of Visual Arts.

Her upcoming book, The Ethics of Calculation: Architecture and Rationalism in Postwar Germany (University of Minnesota Press, 2026), explores the contradictions between rationalism, ethics, and politics in West German architecture and culture from 1968 to 1989. It traces the evolution of debates surrounding rational design, particularly those based on quantification, through the periods of scientization, the student movement, and postmodernism. The book analyzes the complexities of assigning ethical value to rationalism in a nascent democracy, where the social and ecological risks of Cold War-era technologies and late industrial culture were often addressed through intensified technological means. Through case studies from institutions like the Ulm School for Design, Frei Otto's Institute for Lightweight Structures, and Oswald Mathias Ungers' urban research projects at TU Berlin, The Ethics of Calculation shows how the excesses of rationality ultimately led to a “rationality without reason.”

Professor Fabricius is also completing a book titled A Minor Architecture: The Work of Jennifer Bloomer, which collects the prolific yet largely forgotten body of work of architectural theorist Jennifer Bloomer. Bloomer, who published and lectured extensively between 1985 and 2000, was one of the most prominent and influential thinkers on gender, writing, and subjectivity to have emerged in architectural theory. Her unique approach to writing and making was shaped by post-structuralism, experimental fiction, and feminist and literary theory. Bloomer argues for what she calls a “minor architecture,” one that operates transgressively outside of the framework of dominant architectural narratives and ways of building, with particular attention paid to its suppressed materiality. Professor Fabricius is also currently working on the preservation and organization of Bloomer’s archive, with support from the University of Pennsylvania’s University Research Foundation. This project aims to make the archive accessible for future public use.

Professor Fabricius's recent publications include a study on Frei Otto’s unorthodox measurement techniques in Frei Otto: Building with Nature (Prestel, 2025), an essay titled “Postmodernism and the Bauhaus Critique in West Germany” in CCSA Topics (Center for Critical Studies in Architecture, 2025), and a piece on urban and utopian prognostication in Berlin in 1968, published in Perspecta (2023).

She is also a keynote speaker at the upcoming conference “Frei Otto 100: The Spirit of Lightweight Construction” at the Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design in Stuttgart (2025). Additionally, Professor Fabricius participated in a public discussion at Princeton University (2023) on art, architecture, and the metaverse with artist Josephine Meckseper, and presented a paper on environmental activism, media, and surveillance in East Germany at the Third Ecology EAHN Conference organized by MoMA and Iceland University of the Arts (2023).

Her work has appeared in numerous edited volumes and journals, including Architectural Design, arq: Architecture Research Quarterly, Perspecta, Journal of Architecture, Journal of Architectural Education, Harvard Design Magazine, Stadtbauwelt, and Log.

Professor Fabricius’s work has been supported by Penn’s University Research Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, a Faculty Research Fellowship Award at the Pratt Institute School of Architecture, a DAAD Research Fellowship, a Whiting Doctoral Fellowship, and the Canadian Center for Architecture Collection Research Grant. Professor Fabricius was also an architecture fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.

In 2014, she was awarded the Emerging Scholars Prize by the Historians of German and Central European Art. She is also a member of the Advisory Board for the Penn and Slavery Project, a faculty-supported undergraduate research initiative that uncovers the connections between the university and the institution of slavery. https://pennandslaveryproject.org/

Recent and Current Dissertation Advising

Wadha Almutawa, “The Child in the City: Play and the Architectural Design of the Kindergarten Community Unit in Modern Kuwait, 1952-1982” (2024) (Committee Member)

Elisheva Levy, “Beyond Monogamous Architecture" (Committee Member)

M.C. Overholt, “Sex Under Construction: Architecture, Gender, and Sexual Science in the 20th Century American City” (Committee Chair)

Rami Kanafani, “(Space)Ship of Fools? Spiritual Environmentalism, American Counterculture, and an Architecture for a Planetary New Age, 1969-1993” (Committee Member)

Recent and Upcoming Lectures and Events

Keynote speaker, “Frei Otto 100: The Spirit of Lightweight Construction.” Institute for Lightweight Structures and Conceptual Design, University of Stuttgart, Germany, June 6, 2025. https://www.freiotto100.de/

Panelist, Discussion of Josephine Meckseper, Scenario for a Past Future (2023) with the artist, Lewis Center for the Arts and Department of Art & Archaeology, Princeton University, February 13, 2024.

“Monuments of Wismut: Environmental Activism, Surveillance, and Counter-Surveillance in East Germany,” The Third Ecology. EAHN Thematic Conference Reykjavík, MoMA x Iceland University of the Arts, October 11-13, 2023.

“Postmodernism and the Bauhaus Critique in West Germany,” Center for Critical Studies in Architecture Bauhaus Lectures, Deutsches Architekturmuseum Frankfurt, February 14, 2019. https://criticalarchitecture.org/en/veranstaltungen/postmodernism-and-t…

Presenter, “Panel Discussion: Environmental Histories of Architecture,” University of Pennsylvania School of Design, January 30, 2017.

“Thresholds of Calculation: The Material Experiments of Frei Otto,” Symposium Frei Otto: Thinking by Modeling, ZKM (Center for Art and Media), Karlsruhe, January 27, 2017. https://zkm.de/en/media/videos/daniela-fabricius-architecture-as-a-pres…

Session Chair, “Coded Architecture and the Paradoxes of Control,” Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference, Pasadena, CA, April 6-10, 2016.

Moderator and co-organizer, City Futures Conference, University of Pennsylvania School of Design, November 12-13, 2015.

“Image, Medium, Artifact: Heinrich Klotz’s Historiography of Postmodernism,” European Architectural History Network Meeting, Turin, June 19-21, 2014.

“Architecture Before Architecture: Frei Otto and Johann-Georg Helmcke in Collaboration,” Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference, Austin, Texas, April 9-13, 2014.

"Material Calculation: Frei Otto's Soap Film Models," Form Finding, Form Shaping, Designing Architecture, Institute of History and Theory of Art and Architecture, Accademia di Architettura, Università della Svizzera Italiana, Mendrisio, Switzerland, October 10-11, 2013.

Panel chair (“Totality and Fragment”), Henry van de Velde and the Total Work of Art, 12th International Bauhauskolloquium Weimar, April 4-7, 2013.

“The Spinner Experiment: Frei Otto and the Institute for Lightweight Structures,” European Architectural History Network Meeting, Brussels, May 31-June 3, 2012.