New Professor for Architectural Theory and Architectural Design within the platform HTC as of 1.10.: Waltraud Indrist

Waltraud P. Indrist, is an architectural theorist and artistic researcher. From 2018 to 2024 she held an assistant professorship position at the Institute of Architectural Theory, Art History and Cultural Studies, Graz University of Technology. In 2016, she was awarded with the Marietta Blau-Scholarship (project no. ICM-2014-09776) by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Science and Economy for a one-year stay in Berlin.

In 2024 Indrist defended her doctoral thesis with Distinction at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in which she elaborated on Performative Architectural Photographies – The Relationship between Architecture, Media and Politics in the Work of Hans Scharoun between 1933 and 1939. She will receive the “Wissenschaftspreis Architektur der Österreichischen Bundeskammer der Ziviltechniker:innen” for her doctoral thesis in October 2025. The latest excerpt from her research has just been published in RIHA – Journal of the International Association of Research Institutes in the History of Art.

Indrist was recently engaged in the stand-alone research project the “Ambivalences of Modernity. The Architect and City Planner Roland Rainer between Dictatorship and Democracy,” [link: https://www.akbild.ac.at/en/research/projects/research_projects/2022/ambivalences-of-modernity?set_language=en] funded by the Austrian Science Fund – FWF (project no. P34938), in collaboration with Angelika Schnell/ika (project lead), Ingrid Holzschuh, Monika Platzer and Susanne Rick. The research project is a collaboration between the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (where Rainer taught as a professor) and the Az W – Architekturzentrum Wien (where Rainer’s estate is located). The results of this research project will be published in the series Exploring Architecture at Birkhäuser publisher (forthcoming).

Her fields of interest are modern architecture and urbanism, phenomenology, cultural studies, intersectional approaches and artistic research. A central focus of her work is the analysis of the socio-spatial contexts and the media-specific dimensions of artefacts, in which ideologies, forms of governmentality and biopolitics – in the broadest sense of their meaning – are inscribed and therefore call for critical identification. These interests will be part of her teaching courses at the Academy that will elaborate on a critical understanding of historiography, an advanced introduction into the platform’s foci history, theory and critique or on writing about architecture, landscape and cities.

During her professorship at the Academy Indrist will co-curate the 11^th Forum of the Network Architectural Science e. V. [link: https://architekturwissenschaft.net/foren/] together with her colleague Anamarija Batista (Academy). The forum is a cooperation between the Academy, TU Wien (Lorenzo de Chiffre) and the Az W, and aims to synthesise the recent debates on the transformation of the existing, the ‘built fabric’. At the same time, it poses the question of which new advocacies need to be formulated in order to negotiate the issues of social, ecological and aesthetic common good(s) in the context of transformation.

Indrist has taught and presented her research at numerous universities such as UdK Berlin, IIT Chicago, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, Leibniz University Hanover, Vilnius University, University of Bern, Linz University of Arts, Charles University Praha, Bauhaus Dessau, Austrian Academy of Science or KTH Stockholm.
Besides publishing her research interests extensively, she has written for magazines such as ARCH+, Modulør, RIHA – Journal and stadtaspekte, among others.