Biographie

I’m a postdoctoral researcher in the project “Urban Bricolage. Mining, Designing and Constructing With Reused Building Materials” led by Prof Madlen Kobi and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.

My research project tentatively titled  “A Window on Circular Economy” investigates the transnational networks and logistics of window reuse which support the wartime reconstruction in Ukraine. My inquiry is based on the ethnographic fieldwork which I am currently undertaking in Poland and intend to continue in Ukraine and Switzerland.

In 2022 I was awarded a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Manchester for the thesis titled “The Materiality of Ruins: Rubble, Salvaged Bricks, and Waste Aggregates in the Postwar Socialist Reconstruction of Warsaw”. The thesis is an original theoretical and historical account of rubble in the architecture of postwar Europe (thesis abstract).

I have curated exhibitions that disseminated the outcomes of my academic research to a wider public, most notably: “Warsaw 1945-1949: Rising from Rubble” at the Museum of Warsaw (2023) and "See You After the Revolution!" at the Arsenal Gallery in Bialystok (2019).

My research interests revolve around the materiality of architecture defined as a historical relationship between society and nature. My specific areas of expertise include the materiality of ruins, postwar socialist reconstruction in Europe, as well as practice and knowledge of material reuse in historical and contemporary architecture.