Daniela Fabricius, 2025 Inaugural Fellow of the saai/iaas Wüstenrot Foundation Fellowship

PhD (Architecture) graduate group faculty Daniela Fabricius was a 2025 inaugural fellow of the saai/iaas Wüstenrot Foundation Fellowship. There she was working in one of Germany’s oldest architectural archives—the Archive for Architecture and Civil Engineering (saai)—at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

Fabricius studied how the work of women might be better represented in large historic collections like that of the saai, which overwhelmingly represents male architects. Fabricius looked at the few documents representing women architects in the collection, typically subsumed under the archives of their husbands, focusing her research on the photo albums of women like Brigitte Feyerabendt, who later became the second wife of Egon Eiermann, and Maria Verena Fischer, daughter of architect Alfred Fischer, and later the wife of Reinhard Gieselmann. Fabricius studied this genre as a form of autobiography that documents both professional and personal lives through detailed photographic narratives. She argues that it is a medium for thinking differently about the vita and its curriculum to embrace questions of authorship and attribution, collaboration through friendships and marriages, time spent in roles of caretaking, and what ultimately constitutes evidence and archival “value.”

The paper “Archival Genealogies and ‘Family’ Albums: Gender in the saai,” was presented at Robust Fragilities? Systems of Knowledge in the Archive at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology on July 17, 2025.

Special thanks to Martin Kunz and Mechtild Ebert of the saai.