UB architectural historian Despina Stratigakos is spending the 2016-17 academic year advancing her research on the architectural in uences of Germany’s Third Reich as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, one of the world’s leading centers for “curiosity- driven” research and a bastion for academic freedom.
Stratigakos will focus her research on the massive construction schemes undertaken in Norway following Germany’s invasion in 1940 and what they reveal the National Socialist vision of colonial territories in the postwar world Adolf Hitler imagined.
“Norway provides us with a unique view of what much of the world might have looked like had the Nazi regime succeeded in its global colonization plans: cities designed to enforce in their very structures Nazi ideology, vast transportation systems meant to move resources to the metropole, and special cities reserved for German occupiers...While it sounds like science ction, this disturbing plan was partially realized in Norway, and remains a ghost presence in the Norwegian landscape.”
As a historian and writer interested in the intersection of architecture and power, Stratigakos has produced award-winning scholarship including Hitler at Home (2015), Where are the Women Architects (2016) and A Women’s Berlin (2008).
