Lecture Series: Susanne Schindler

Fall 2024 David Dillon Memorial Lecture

Susanne Schindler

Design Critic, Urban Planning & Design, Harvard GSD. Research Fellow, Harvard Joint Center for Housing.

Susanne Schindler is a Research Fellow at the Center, an architect, and an historian interested in the relationship between architecture, finance, and regulation in housing. Dr. Schindler studies history to understand the present and connects information across national boundaries to challenge the assumptions that shape the future of living together. Her research aims to identify the conditions for more innovative housing design through cooperative and public development models.

Schindler is dedicated to public scholarship and writes regularly for a range of publications, including Urban Omnibus, Platform, and Places. Her essay “The Case for Truly Public Housing” (with Chris Moyer) will be part of the inaugural exhibition at the National Public Housing Museum in Chicago in 2024. The book Cooperative Conditions: A Primer on Architecture, Finance and Regulation in Zurich (with Anne Kockelkorn and Rebekka Hirschberg) will be released by gta Verlag in 2024.

Previously, Schindler was the lead researcher and co-curator of House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate at Columbia University’s Buell Center, and co-editor (with Reinhold Martin and Jacob Moore) of The Art of Inequality: Architecture, Housing, and Real Estate—A Preliminary Report (2015). She was also senior scientist and co-director of the MAS Program in the History and Theory of Architecture at ETH Zurich, and has taught urbanism and design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT, and the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Schindler holds a professional degree in architecture from Berlin University of the Arts and a Doctor of Sciences in architectural history from ETH Zurich.