Lisa Beißwanger is a research associate in the departments of Architecture Theory and Science and Architecture and Art History at the department of Architecture at the Technical University of Darmstadt. As an art historian, she approaches architecture from a cultural-studies and critical-analytical perspective. Her research areas include: Art and architecture of the 20th and 21st centuries and their socio-political contexts, institutional theory and critique, discourses of body, space and movement in the arts, museum and exhibition research, school and university architecture, and perspectives on the history of education and science.
After completing her master’s degree in art history at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, she worked for several years in the museum field, including at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. She then completed her doctorate at the Justus-Liebig-University Giessen. There she taught art history at the Institute for Art Education and was a member of the international cultural studies graduate center GCSC. Her dissertation will be published in fall 2021 under the title “Performance on Display – On the History of Living Art in Museums” in German by Deutscher Kunstverlag.
The subject of her postdoctoral project is the phenomenon of campus architecture in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1960s. These large-scale projects are examined in the light of (then) contemporary educational politics and theory, especially systems theory and cybernetics. This raises questions about implicit as well as explicit systemic parameters and the inclusions and exclusions they consciously or unconsciously make.