Bio
Maura Lucking is a historian of architectural modernism and the nineteenth century U.S. She is interested in design as the intersection of connected histories of race, craft, land, and labor.
Her current book project, titled Settler Campus, provides an architectural history of the Land Grant college movement. In it, she studies the relationship between government policy, land use, campus planning, and design pedagogy at schools founded after the U.S. Civil War, considering the role of design practices in Black and Native dispossession as well as the construction of new racial identities and settler colonial hierarchies.
Another interest is in sociotechnical and media histories of architectural representation, including mechanical drawing & blueprinting, architectural photography, and mortgage and loan documents. New research considers the paperwork practices of state and philanthropic institutions organizing homebuilding projects in Indian country.
She has previously worked at the Graham Foundation and the Art Institute of Chicago and produced media projects including the documentary short “Church of Schindler” (2016) and the upcoming “I Pity the Countries” series on the Race & podcast. She is currently co-chair of the Race & Architectural History research group of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Her scholarly work has been supported by the Winterthur Museum, the Huntington Library, the Graham Foundation, the Society for Architectural Historians, and the Getty Research Institute and has appeared in Grey Room, the Getty Research Journal, Thresholds, Faktur, and the Journal of Architectural Education.
Education
Ph.D. University of California, Los Angeles
M.A. School of the Art Institute of Chicago
B.A. Boston College
Research Focus
Architectural Modernism
Architecture & Colonialism
Landscape & Land Use
Craft & Labor History
Media & Representation
Architectural Pedagogy
Courses
ARCH 102 Architectural Thinking I
ARCH 585 Research Methods in Architecture
ARCH 533 Race, Myth & Landscape
Selected Work
Refereed Articles
Maura Lucking, “Self-Suggestion in the Tuskegee Machine: Technical Drawing Under Jim Crow.” Grey Room 87 (2022).
Maura Lucking and Anna Goodman, “Images Doing Work: Construction Photography at the Tuskegee Institute and Black Mountain College.” Journal of Architectural Education 73:2 (2019).
Maura Lucking, “‘Alcuni dei miei progetti’: Aldo Rossi and the Editorial Impulse.” Getty Research Journal 11 (2019).
Maura Lucking, “Seeing Clearly What Is Good: Russell Sturgis and the Didactic Image.” Thresholds 46 (2018).
Selected Book Chapters
Maura Lucking, “Prentice Women’s Hospital and Maternity Center Architectural and Planning Systems Table.” Sylvia Lavin, ed. Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernist Myths (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2020).
Selected Other Media
“I Pity the Countries: Comparative Spatial Histories of Settler Colonialism,” series of audio essays produced for the Race & Podcast, Society of Architectural Historians (2023).