Education

PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

B.Arch., M.Arch., Yale University

Profile

Tijana is a historian of modern architecture, design and spatial theory with an extensive record of publications in various related areas: utopia, Soviet Architecture, Eastern European avant-gardes, and domesticity. Her first book, Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (Manchester University Press, 2017) argues for a reconsideration of utopia in the East by showing that the centre of communist architecture was the individual, rather than the collective, and explores the technologies of self-fashioning from everyday rituals of care, to choreographies of movement and spatial economies of affect and desire.

Her second book, The Pleasure of Politics: Utopia as an Architectural Project, expands on the scope on the first one – theoretically, historically, and geographically – to discuss the long history of utopia from More to the colonization of Mars in terms of its architecture. Whereas utopia is traditionally discussed in terms of abstract ideological schemes or, at most, the spatial diagram, this book goes deeply into the correspondence between radical ideas about the sensorium and the nitty-gritty of the world’s material make, on the one hand, and radical ideas about social relationships on the other.

Tijana is also working on a project tentatively titled Communism, Internationalism, Nature: Utopia and the Non-Human, exploring the role of non-human protagonists in communist environmental politics during the Cold War. The focus of this work is the role of animals (as both symbols and “protagonists”) in charting global space, bridging in this work architectural history, cultural geography, animal studies, and feminist theory.

In addition to these three major projects, Tijana’s research portfolio, that of a scholar embedded in both the discipline of design and that of historical scholarship, spans different academic and non-academic genres. She was the co-curator of the Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023, with the project addressing the Canadian housing crisis – Not for Sale! She has scripted film, directed TikTok and Instagram campaigns, written criticism of contemporary culture and art, in addition to producing peer-reviewed articles and book chapters. Her work on a range of topics always connected by a keen interest in the relation between aesthetics and politics, has been funded by the MIT Presidential Fellowship, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, American Association of University Women, and others. She was the 2018-2020 Fellow of the University of Strasbourg Institute of the Advanced Studies, where she joined the Laboratory for Image, City and the Environment (LIVE).

Teaching

DES 320 History of the Design of the Built Environment

ARCH 597 Themes in Architecture

ARCH 404/DES 321 Topics in Architectural History – Domesticity 1 (pre-1900)

ARCH 505/DES 322 Topics in Architectural History – Domesticity 2 (post-1900)

ARCH 505/DES 322 Topics in Architectural History – Utopia/Dystopia

ARCH 505 Topics in Architectural History – The Body Politic

ARCH 405/505 Topics in Architectural History – Architecture and Subjectivity

ARCH 404/505 Topics in Architectural History – Modernism and the Non-Human

ARCH 505/DES 322 Topics in Architectural History – Writing Women into the Canon of Architecture and Landscape Architecture

Publications

Soviet Architecture

Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (book), Manchester University Press, 2017.

‘The Soviet Banya and the Mass-Production of Hygiene’, Architectural Histories: Journal of the European Architectural History Network 1 (1): 26, 2013, 1-15, re-linked in MOMA Magazine, ’Twenty Ways of Reading through a Crisis: thought-provoking articles and books explore design in the time of COVID-19’, May 13 2020.

‘The Everyday as the Soviet Gesamtkunstwerk’, Thesis Eleven vol. 152 (1) 2019, 52-68.

‘The Flying Proletarian: Soviet Citizens at the Thresholds of Utopia’, Grey Room 59, Spring 2015, 78-101.

‘The Communist Egosphere’, in Danilo Udovicki, editor, Dom Narkomfin, Austin: University of Texas Press and Tubingen: Ernst Wasmuth Verlag, 2015, 43-50.

‘Living Efficiently’, Open: Proceedings of the 30th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians of Australia and New Zealand 2013 (1), 739-748.

‘Problemy prostranstva sovetskogo byta 20-ih I 30-ih godov v zapadnoy istoriografii’ [Problems of the Space of Soviet Everyday Life in Western Historiography], Mavrodinskie Chtenia: All Russian Historical Conference in Honour of Prof. Vladimir Mavrodin, State University in St. Petersburg, 2009, 529-532.

‘Moscow Interiors: A tour through the entrails of a city’, Nicholas Herman, editor,Russian Art in Translation/Russkoe isskustvo v perevode. New York: Ante Projects #5, 35-41, 2007.

The Balkan Avant-garde

‘Zenitism and Orientalism’, Zbornik Radova Akademije umetnosti [Almanac of the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad] no. 9 (October 2021), 29-45. (with Iva Glisic)

‘’I am Barbarogenius’: Yugoslav Avant-garde and the Limits of Performativity’, Slavic and East European Journal, 60:4 (2016) 718-743. (with Iva Glisic)

Communism and the Non-Human

‘Homage to the Sad Space Bitch: Laika-Belka-Strelka’, Thresholds no. 48 (2020): Kin, 148-157.

‘Of Animals and Seas: Menageries as Representations of Yugoslav Global and Local Space in the Cold War Era’, Cultural Geographies Vol. 26 Issue 1 (2018), 73-87.

Western Utopia

‘Architecture of the Avant-Apocalypse: Preservation beyond Preservation of the Species’, Leonardo Vol. 55, No. 3 (June) 2022, 258-262.

‘Frank Lloyd Wright, Ayn Rand, and Hyper-Capitalist Utopia’, Serbian Architectural Journal 2014 (6), 196-208.

‘Tahiti, Redesigned’, Thresholds 41: Revolution, 196-199 (2013), with Michael Osman, under the pseudonym Montenegro Airways.

Gender and Domesticity

Russia and former Soviet Union section, in Karen Burns and Lori Brown, editors, Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2015, Bloomsbury, forthcoming in 2024 (with Alla Vronskaya)

‘Minor Architectures, Micro Empires: Women and the Production of Domestic Space on the Pacific 19th century ‘Frontier’’, ARENA: Journal of Architectural Research 2023; 8(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.55588/ajar.380

Creative Work

‘Not for Sale’, Canadian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023, curatorial collective Architects Against Housing Alienation (Andrew Blackwell, David Fortin, Matthew Soules, Sara Stevens, Patrick Stewart, Tijana Vujosevic).

‘Atlas of Housing Alienation’, documentary film shown at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2023 (with Marie-Esperance Cerda and Sara Stevens).

Zoopol: Monument to the Animal Kingdom’, Honourable Mention, ‘Ecological Borders’ competition, organized by Think Space, Croatia, 2011 (with Andrew Atwood, John May, and Anna Neimark)

‘Millennium House’, in Millennium House, Peggy Deamer author and editor. New York: Monacelli Press, 2004, 79, 88-89, 113, 132-133, 156-159.

‘All Isms Turn into Wasms’ (Millennium House project); ‘This is Not as Good as Mies’ (Chicago Skyscraper project), Retrospecta 2000-2001, New Haven: Yale University School of Architecture, pp.n/a

‘Fashion Museum,’ Retrospecta 1999-2000, New Haven, Yale University School of Architecture. p. 50.

Book Reviews

Mechtild Widrich, ‘Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art’, Art Margins Online, March 11, 2023.

Katherine Zubovich, ‘Moscow Monumental’, Art Journal Volume 80, Issue 1 (Fall 2021), 128-129.

Anson Rabinbach, ‘The Eclipse of Utopias of Labour’, Thesis Eleven, First Published June 12, 2019.

Adam Sharr and Stephen Thornton, ‘Demolishing Whitehall: Leslie Martin, Harold Wilson and the Architecture of White Heat’, Architectural History 61 (2018): 299-301. 

Martino Stierli, ‘Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography and Film’, Journal of Architectural Education 68:2 (2014), 141-143.

Lukasz Stanek, ‘Henri Lefevre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research and the Production of Theory’European Architectural History Network Newsletter, 2/12 (2012).