UIC’s College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts (CADA) has selected Associate Professor Alexander Eisenschmidt as the recipient of the CADA Distinguished Faculty Award for 2020–22. The award supports the research of a senior faculty member for two academic years. The committee cited Eisenschmidt’s continuous research activity and significant national and international recognition in its selection announcement.
Eisenschmidt recently published The Good Metropolis: From Urban Formlessness to Metropolitan Architecture (Birkhäuser, 2019), an investigation into the productive tension between the modern city and architectural form. Reviews have described the book as a “theoretically crisp and elegantly written” (Sandy Isenstadt) publication that “brilliantly explains how the formless and unpredictable metropolitan condition…became an exhilarating resource for architecture” (Simon Sadler).
Eisenschmidt is currently working on a new book project focused on the Mexican architect Felix Candela, which will be the first study to interrogate Candela’s time in Chicago, from 1971 to 1978. The project will unearth the specific political, material, and labor conditions that prompted Candela’s departure from Mexico City and will shed light on his reception in Chicago as well as his penetrating view of the architectural culture that he encountered in the US.
This marks the second year in a row that School of Architecture faculty have been granted the award. For more on Eisenschmidt’s work, visit aeisenschmidt.com.