Education
PhD, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
B.Arch., M.Arch., Yale University
Profile
Tijana is a historian of modern architecture, with an extensive record of publications on utopia, gender, and domesticity across historical periods and geographies. Tijana’s work is driven by a devotion to probing the relationship between aesthetics and politics, a sustained effort to rethink the architectural cannon, and a commitment to challenging the historical divide between the history of private life and political history.
Tijana’s 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 project, The Pleasure of Politics. 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 the abstract diagram, this book goes deeply into the correspondence between radical ideas about the sensorium, on the one hand, and revolutionary ideas about social relationships on the other.
Tijana 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 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
Select publications
BOOK
Modernism and the Making of the Soviet New Man (book), Manchester University Press, 2017.
ARTICLES
‘Photography and the Domestication of History at the Margins of Empire’, Grey Room 98 (Winter 2025), pp. 54-73.
‘Second Sex in the Second World’, Introduction to the Russia and former Soviet Union Section of The Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture 1960-2015, 2025 (with Alla Vronskaya)
‘Minor Architectures, Micro Empires: Women and the Production of Domestic Space on the Pacific 19thcentury ‘Frontier’’, ARENA: Journal of Architectural Research 2023; 8(1). DOI: https://doi.org/10.55588/ajar.380
‘Architecture of the Avant-Apocalypse: Preservation beyond Preservation of the Species’, Leonardo Vol. 55, No. 3 (June) 2022, 258-262.
‘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)
‘Homage to the Sad Space Bitch: Laika-Belka-Strelka’, Thresholds no. 48 (2020): Kin, 148-157.
‘The Everyday as the Soviet Gesamtkunstwerk’, Thesis Eleven vol. 152 (1) 2019, 52-68.
‘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.
”I am Barbarogenius’: Yugoslav Avant-garde and the Limits of Performativity’, Slavic and East European Journal, 60:4 (2016) 718-743. (with Iva Glisic)
‘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.
‘Frank Lloyd Wright, Ayn Rand, and Hyper-Capitalist Utopia’, Serbian Architectural Journal 2014 (6), 196-208.
‘The Soviet Banya and the Mass-Production of Hygiene’, Architectural Histories: Journal of the European Architectural History Network 1 (1): 26, 2013, 1-15
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).