Dr. Tamar Zinguer
Education
Princeton University
Ph.D., History and Theory of Architecture
Technion Israel Institute of Technology
M.Sc., Architecture
The Cooper Union
Bachelor of Architecture
Contact
Curriculum Vitae
About
Tamar Zinguer is an architect, architectural historian and educator whose overall project is concerned with the pedagogy of design through history and across scales. From the level of the object to the landscape, she looks at aspects of construction and destruction – which you can see present in all her work – teaching and research. She locates architecture and its discourse within a broader field of cultural studies, art history, history of technology, literature and sociology.
Tamar’s book, Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys (University of Virginia Press, 2015) shows how for nearly two hundred years, playthings have reflected changing attitudes towards form, structure, and permanence, echoing modernist experiments while also incorporating technological advances in their systems of construction.
Her present book manuscript Sandbox: An Architectural History (forthcoming MIT Press) follows the ubiquitous space of the sandbox from its pedagogical beginnings in 19th Century Berlin, its adoption worldwide as a tool of urban regeneration post-war, to its subsequent decline—being considered a source of infestation—and ultimate rebirth as a significant trope in land art.
Tamar’s second book manuscript in progress, “Architecture Degree Zero,” follows historians and critics who used the expression “degree zero” in relation to architecture. She investigates different modalities of minimalism and nothingness and asks, could an interest in zero—the numeric embodiment of emptiness—inform and change the output of a discipline whose formal manifestations have lately become more and more complicated?
Tamar Zinguer’s work was supported by fellowships from the Canadian Center for Architecture, the Smithsonian Institution, Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention, Barre-Ferree Foundation and more. She received her B.Arch. from The Cooper Union, M.Sc. in Architecture from Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. She has taught as Visiting Critic at Cornell University, Columbia University and Princeton and for the past 16 years was part of the full-time faculty at The Cooper Union, NYC.
Professional Credentials
Registered Architect in Israel, No. 41737.
Selected Publications
“All’Origine della Sandbox”/“The Infancy of the Sandbox.” FAMagazine. No. 51, 2020,
Scientific Open-Access e-journal; ISSN: 2039-0491, pp. 88-103.
“History of the Sandbox: Between the Intimate and the Vast.” Proceedings of 2017, ACSA Fall
conference, ACSA Press, Summer 2018.
Zinguer, Tamar. Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2015.
Awards
Visiting Scholar, Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal (2014).
The Barr-Ferree Foundation, Princeton University (2013)
The Program in American studies, Princeton University (2003).
Smithsonian Institution-The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention (2002).
The Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities (2001-2002).
The Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal, Canada (2001), Predoctoral Fellowship.
The Richard D. Cramer Fellowship (2000).
The Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship in Architecture (1999).
The Young Architect Award, Israel (1998).
The Leon Reiskin Award, Technion (1998).
Excellence in Teaching Award, Technion (1996).
Technion Israel Institute of Technology Fellowship (1994-1997).
“Keren Sharet” (Sharet Fund) Design Prize, Israel (1994).
American Institute of Architects Minority and Disadvantaged Scholarship (1984-1986).