Spyros Papapetros
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Princeton University

Berthold Leibinger Fellow - Class of Spring 2016

Spyros Papapetros is an art and architectural historian and theorist at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, where he co-directs the Program in Media and Modernity. Papapetros is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (2012), co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (2014), and editor of Space as Membrane, by Siegfried Ebeling (2010). Papapetros’ work has appeared in October, Grey Room, Perspecta, AA Files, Oxford Art Journal, and RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics. In 2012 Papapetros participated in the exhibition “Animismus,” which travelled from Vienna’s Generali Foundation to Berlin’s Haus der Kulturen der Welt and New York’s e-flux. In 2014 he participated in the Berlin Berlinnale, in a discussion with artist Olaf Nicolai. Papapetros has received grants from the Fulbright program, Getty Research Institute, Clark Art Institute, Graham Foundation, Townsend Center for the Humanities, and Canadian Centre for Architecture. He was also an associate fellow at the Warburg Institute in London.

Project Description

World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale

Papapetros’ Academy project, “World Ornament,” examined bodily and architectural adornment in the work of the German architect Gottfried Semper (1803-1879), who understood ornament as a means of attuning humans with the cosmos. From the 1850s until the early twentieth century, Semper’s ideas, Papapetros argues, gained increased currency; ornament came to be seen as having the ability to reunite a world ruptured by cultural, political, and ethnic divisions. Semper’s view of ornament was forgotten or repressed in postwar scholarship and modern art. Papapetros’ project recovers this rich tradition and explores how issues of ornament and “surface” have informed the work of contemporary architects and theorists.

Academy Activities

01 Feb 16

Fellow Spotlight: Spyros Papapetros

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University, and the Berthold Leibinger Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in the class of Spring 2016. Papapetros’ Academy project, “World Ornament,” examines bodily and architectural adornment in ...

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09 Feb 16

World Ornament: Adornment on a Global Scale

Architectural historian Spyros Papapetros’s lecture focuses on the theorization of bodily adornment by Emil Selenka, renowned evolutionist and anthropologist, and his wife, Lenore Selenka, a prominent feminist, pacifist, zoologist, and amateur anthropologist, who collected a large quantity of ethn ...

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