Dr Jasper Ludewig

My research is concerned with how architecture participates in systems of colonial governance and ecological imperialism with an emphasis on the nineteenth-century Tasman world. I analyse the spatial characteristics of colonial occupation and expansion, the relationship between political authority and private power, and the role played by buildings and other spatial practices in relation to the political economy of land. I work in archives, studying how architecture shows up within broader institutional projects, whether mining companies, missionary organisations, banks or government agencies. I am interested in what architecture does in these contexts: how it facilitates things like the law, capital and ideas about political order, and what this means for how buildings are conceptualised, designed, constructed and maintained, by whom and in whose interests.

My writing has been published in Architecture Beyond Europe, Journal of Architecture, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Fabrications, Geographical Research and Architectural Theory Review. Commencing in 2024, I am a Chief Investigator on the ARC Discovery Project, Mapping the Frontiers of Private Property in Australia (DP240100395), which will document the first instance of the alienation of all Crown land in New South Wales. In 2023, I was the Society of Architectural Historians (US) H. Allen Brooks Fellow. In 2021, I was Research Fellow at the Architectures of Order LOEWE Research Cluster, co-hosted by the Goethe University Frankfurt, Technical University Darmstadt, the German Architecture Museum and the Max Planck Institute for Legal History and Legal Theory. In the same year, my research was awarded the David Saunders Founders Grant by the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand. In 2017, I was Doctoral Fellow at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and, in 2014, my research received the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) President's Dissertation Medal. My first monograph, A Complicated Organism: The Architecture of the Global Moravian Network, 1722-1922 is due to be published in 2024 by the Centre for Critical Studies in Architecture at the Goethe University Frankfurt.

I pursue my broader interest in the architectural humanities as Associate Editor and Book Reviews Editor at Architectural Theory Review.

I teach research-led design studios in the undergraduate and postgraduate architecture degrees in addition to courses on the history and theory of architecture. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and have written and presented on architectural pedagogy in CIRCA: Journal of Architecture and Design, Architecture Bulletin and at the Conference of the Association of Architecture Educators (UK).

My Instagram handle is @jasplud. My Academia profile can be found here.

Please feel free to get in touch!