Lecturer

Mélanie van der Hoorn was born in 1975. She studied Cultural Anthropology at the Universities of Leiden and Amsterdam, where she specialized in Material Culture. Her Master thesis „The Negative (of the) City. Unbuilt Projects and Undesirable Architecture in Vienna” was awarded the Boekman Prize for the best Dutch Master-thesis on Art and Culture in 2000. In 2005, she obtained her doctorate at the University of Utrecht with her dissertation „Indispensable Eyesores. An Anthropology of Undesired Buildings“, that was published by Berghahn Books in 2009. Since her move to Vienna in 2007 she has been working as an independent researcher and curator, and since 2013 as an external lecturer at Vienna University of Technology and the University of Innsbruck. In her projects, she focuses on the presentation and communication, perception and assessment of architecture. In particular, she conducted research on architectural narratives and presentations in the form of comics and graphic novels, which resulted in her book „Bricks & Balloons: Architecture in Comic-Strip Form“, published by 010 in 2012, as well as in an exhibition to be opened in the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo in 2015. Her current research relates to: 1.) the potentials of film for architecture, as a mode of representation, communication and advertising; and 2.) the communication between architects and educators with regard during the realization of school buildings.