Eve Blau is an urban and architectural historian specializing in modern architecture and urban design. Adjunct Professor of the History and Theory of Urban Form and Design in the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, she has been Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative since 2013, and was Director of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard (2022-2025). Before coming to Harvard, Blau was Curator of Exhibitions and Publications at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal and Editor of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Blau’s research engages a range of issues in modern architecture and urbanism and the productive intersection between urban spatial form and media. The underlying concern is with the complex dynamics of urban transformation in the context of rapidly changing sociopolitical, environmental, and technological conditions. The purpose is to understand how these conditions are reorganizing built environments in ways that challenge the fixed categories by which we have traditionally understood the urban. A major focus is on cities and urban regions in the post-socialist world that have experienced large-scale adjustments to new forms of polity, systemic institutional change, and economic reorganization. Those dynamics are examined in books, exhibitions, media projects, and a series of courses framed in terms of ‘Transition as Condition’. Blau’s books include Baku: Oil and Urbanism (2018); The Architecture of Red Vienna, 1919-1934 (2014/1999); Project Zagreb: Transition as Condition, Strategy, Practice (2007); Shaping the Great City: Modern Architecture in Central Europe (2000); Architecture and Cubism (2001/1997); Architecture or Revolution: Charles Moore and Yale in the late 1960s (2001); Architecture and Its Image: Four Centuries of Architectural Representation (1989). In her current research, the focus shifts from the dynamics of transition to those of crisis – to radical change, violent disruption, catastrophic events – acts of war and environmental disaster, which are examined not as states of exception but as chronic conditions of global urbanization processes and practices. Construction in that context is a continuous process of reconstruction. Those dynamics and their significance for architecture, urban planning and design are the concerns of an ongoing multi-year research project, a series of courses at the GSD, and an exhibition on reconstruction in times of war and environmental crisis. Blau is President of the Board of Directors of the AFCCA, Canadian Centre for Architecture; former Vice President of the International Scholarly Advisory Board of the International Research Center for Cultural Studies_IFK, Vienna; and member of the Scientific Board, gta papers, ETH Zurich Institute for History and Theory of Architecture. In 2015 Blau was awarded the Victor Adler State Prize of the Republic of Austria for her contributions to the history of social movements and the innovative methods of her scholarship. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians. Co-Director, Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, GSD/FAS Faculty Council, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies Faculty Associate, Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies Faculty Associate, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs Faculty Associate, Science, Technology and Society (STS) Program Faculty Associate, Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability