Team

team - online group photo

our team: up (f.l.t.r.): Sarah Wheat, Prof. Dr. Alla Vronskaya, Dorothea Blank; middle (f.l.t.r.): Constanze Kummer, Benjamin Eckel, Megan Eardley; down: Fee Huschenbeth.

Fellows

Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow

University of Kassel, Department of Architecture, State planning and Landscape design

 

I am a historian of Soviet urban development. I am interested in urban history and mass housing, socialist architecture, and planning. In particular, I look at Soviet construction projects and development assistance to the Global South. My forthcoming book ‘Experiments in Concrete: Manufacturing Prefabricated Housing in the Soviet Union’ explores the understudied architectural story of the ‘bureaucratic modernism’ of prefabricated housing. In contrast to a rather simplistic view of standardised housing development as the ‘end’ of architecutre, and a takeover of the profession by construction experts, the book reconstructs a complex and uneven history, as the housing drive became central to the formation of late-Soviet design culture, construction industry and urban sociology.

 

I am currently working on a new project that focuses on urbanisation processes in socialist Mongolia. The project explores how exchanges with the Soviet Union, Eastern European states and China fundamentally reshaped the urban space and daily life in Mongolia. The project establishes a multidisciplinary framework to explore the experiences of local and foreign specialists, workers, and citizens alike, engaged in transnational construction projects. More broadly, the project seeks to provide new understandings about the urbanisation processes in the Global South during the Cold War and sheds light on the complexities and dynamics of transnational cooperation in shaping the built environment.

 

I have received my D.Phil (PhD) in History from the University of Oxford in 2020 and a specialist degree in the History of Art from Moscow State University in 2014. I was a postdoc at Department of Urban Studies at the University of Basel and at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia at New York University.

 

My fellowship at the University of Kassel has been possible due to the support from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Previously I have benefited from generous scholarships from the Hill Foundation at Oxford and the Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, among others.

 

Publications

N. Erofeev, ‘Complementary Assistance: Exchanges Between Mongolia, the Soviet Union, China, and Poland during the Cold War.’ Cold War History (forthcoming, 2024).

 

N. Erofeev, ‘Building the Space of Internationalism: Socialist Assistance to Mongolia in the 1950s-70s.’ In Rethinking Socialist Space, edited by Marcus Cola and Paul Betts (London: Palgrave MacMillan, forthcoming, 2024).

 

N. Erofeev, ‘Late-Soviet Collective Housing: Self-Help Construction and Self-Management in Youth Residential Complex Housing Movement’ Journal of Urban History (forthcoming, 2024).

 

N. Erofeev, ‘Shabashniki.’ In Global Encyclopaedia of Informality, Volume 3, edited by Alena Ledeneva (London: UCL Press, 2024).

 

N. Erofeev, ‘“Camus est petit, Rozanov est grand”: Soviet housing production and technological transfer from France.’ in Panel Master: the Raymond Camus Story, edited by Natalia Solopova (Dom Publishers, 2024)

 

N. Erofeev and Ł. Stanek, ‘Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Concerns of Comecon’s Technical Assistance to Mongolia During the Cold War.’ In Between Solidarity and Economic Constraints, edited by C. Bernhardt, A.Butter and M. Motylinska, 43-72 (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023).
 

N. Erofeev and Ł. Stanek, ‘Integrate, Adapt, Collaborate: Comecon Architecture in Socialist Mongolia’ ABE Journal 19 (2021), DOI: 10.4000/abe.12604
 

N. Erofeev ‘Cybernetics & Standardization: Revisiting a Soviet Vision for Better Urbanism’ Strelka MAG (04.10.2021).
 

N. Erofeev ‘The I-464 Housing Delivery System: technological transfers from France to Moscow, from Moscow to Alma-Ata, from Alma-Ata to Havana’ Project Russia, 96 (2021), p. 239-64.
 

N. Erofeev 'The I-464 Housing Delivery System: A Tool for Urban Modernisation in the Socialist World and Beyond' Fabrications, 29/2 (2019), doi:10.1080/10331867.2019.1611255
 

N. Erofeev and M. Sapunova, 'Urban Standard and Norm and Their (Post)-Socialist Transformation', Urban Studies and Practices, 3/4 (2018), pp. 7-11

 

DPhil Dissertation

Erofeev, Nikolay. "Experiment in the Architecture of Soviet Mass Housing, 1956–1990."D.Phil thesis, Oxford University, History faculty, 2020.

 

Book Reviews

N. Erofeev ‘Review: Moscow Monumental: Soviet Skyscrapers and Urban Life in Stalin's Capital, By Katherine Zubovich’ Social History, 46/3 (2021), p.336-338.

 

Biography

Wheat’s research interests highlight cross-cultural and transnational aspects of architecture and design in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her dissertation, titled “Harem Mystique: Popular Architecture and the Orient ca. 1900,” explores the appropriation and commercialization of Islamic motifs in European and American popular architecture from approximately 1880-1933. She particularly examines how the spatial image of the Ottoman imperial harem was simultaneously commodified for profit and strategically used by some to challenge gendered conceptions of space.

In addition to topics related to orientalism, feminist, and spatial theory, Wheat is also interested in global modernisms, the diaspora of German speaking architects and designers before and during the Second World War, the interplay of scientific and spiritual understandings of European modernisms, architectural ethnography in the nineteenth century, histories of industrial architecture, and alternative methods for researching women’s interventions in the built environment before 1900.

Wheat has earned two B.A. degrees in Art History and German Studies from Georgia State University, an M.A. in Modern and Contemporary Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a focus on design history from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an M.A. in the History of Art with a focus on the history of architecture from the University of Michigan.

She has worked at Kulturprojekte in Berlin and the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago. Her research has been supported by the Freie Universität’s Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Fellowship, the Max Kade Foundation Scholarship, among others.

Biography
 

Megan Eardley studies the intersections of architecture, science and technology, and political philosophy in southern Africa in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current research examines how the South African mining industry shaped models and concepts of life in deep space during the Cold War. While attending to histories of labor, race, and gender, she foregrounds questions about measurement, the language of standards, and the future of 'the human' in environments that are hostile to biological life. In recent years, her work has been supported by NASA, the National Science Foundation, the History of Science Society, as well as the Canadian Center for Architecture. In 2020-2021, Megan is a PhD Candidate in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Witwatersrand.

Student assistants

David Rothfuss (B.A., B.Sc.) graduated in Theatre Studies and History of Arts at Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz. Currently he is writing his masters thesis in the field of Landscape Architecture in Kassel about strategies and methods of intervention and disruption of and in urban space inbetween the concepts of activism, iconoclasm and sabotage. As a member of the interdisciplinary „Urbane Xtopien" project (xtopien.org, 2020-2023) funded by Robert Bosch Stiftung, he contributed in questions of spatial aesthetic processes and issues relating to architecture and open space and worked on several xtopian experiments with partners such as documenta fifteen, Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Staatstheater Kassel or Museum für Sepulkralkultur Kassel. Beyond former engangement at Staatstheater Karlsruhe, in his current artistic practice, he aims at reconfiguring spaces via performative strategies.

He supports the whole chair through various tasks.

 

Publications and contributions:

J. Jossin, A. Voigt, T. Godlewski, R. Beecroft, M. Arnold, F. Bernstein, S. Messerschmidt, D. Rothfuss, S. Multhaup, I. Olshausen, M. Aweh, M. Lafratta, U. Amrehn (2023): Toolbox für Xtopien. Neue Werkzeuge für Zukunftsgestalter:innen. kassel university press.

A. Voigt, D. Rothfuss, J. Jossin (2023): Freiraum für Übermorgen. Das transformative Potential spielerischen Visionierens. In: K. Singer, K. Schmidt, M. Neuburger (Eds.) (2023): Artographies. Kreativ-künstlerische Zugänge zu einer machtkritischen Raumforschung. transcript, Bielefeld.

N. Becker, D. Rothfuss, G. Thole (2022): humus.raum. In: UniKasselTransfer (Eds.) (2022): Wissensspeicher. Eine Ausstellung mit 100 Ideen für eine nachhaltigerere Zukunft. kassel university press.

D. Rothfuss (2021): Gelebte Realität in virtuellen Freiräumen. In: S. Hennecke / D. Münderlein (Eds.) (2021): Freiraum in der Krise?! Eine Bestandsaufnahme in Zeiten der Covid-19-Pandemie. kassel university press.

D. Rothfuss (2020): Paris Nouveau. Über den avantgardistischen Umbau einer Metropole. In: Deutsche Gesellschaft für Garten und Landschaft (Eds.) (2020): Gärten im Klimawandel. Herausforderungen, Konzepte, Perspektiven. Georg, München.

Philip Stöcker supports the work linked to the lecture GdgU (Geschichte der gebauten Umwelt).