Dr. Sebastiaan Loosen
Dr. Sebastiaan Loosen
Lecturer at the Department of Architecture
ETH Zürich
Geschichte u.Theorie d. Städtebaus
Additional information
Sebastiaan Loosen is senior lecturer and postdoctoral researcher at the Chair of History and Theory of Urban Design. His current research focuses on the 1960-80s agenda of foreign aid and how architecture figured in the knowledge economy fostered by it. This ranges from the role of architectural schools in Europe developing training programs and research projects, to the emergence of new housing paradigms, such as the so-called “sites-and-services” approach. A recent outcome of this research is a co-edited double theme issue of ABE Journal. Architecture Beyond Europe on ‘Architecture in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy’ (2023).
After obtaining degrees in architectural engineering and in philosophy, he completed his doctoral dissertation, Shaping Social Commitment. Architecture and Intellectuality in the 1970s and ’80s, on the formative years of architectural theory in Belgium, investigating the various vantage points from which ‘the social’ was addressed in architectural thought (KU Leuven, 2019). In general, his work revolves around historiographical challenges, social commitment, and the intricacies of a globalizing architectural culture. On these themes, he co-edited for the EAHN’s open access journal Architectural Histories a Special Collection on ‘Marxism and Architectural Theory across the East-West Divide’ as well as an open access volume at Leuven University Press based on the international conference Theory’s History, 196X-199X. Challenges in the Historiography of Architectural Knowledge, held in Brussels, February 2017. From 2020 to 2024, he served on the editorial board of Architectural Histories.
Additional information
Courses
Research Studio 'Swiss Coloniality' (Spring 2025)
Seminar Course 'Global Theories of Urban Design' (Spring 2025)
Seminar Course ‘The City Lived: Sites-and-Services’ (Autumn 2024)
Seminar Week ‘Designing Urban Welfare: Stockholm 1930s-2000s’ (Autumn 2024)
Research Studio ‘Swiss Coloniality and Its Architectures of Knowledge’ (Spring 2024)
Research Studio ‘Swiss Coloniality and Its Industrial Architectures’ (Autumn 2023)
Seminar Week ‘Das Neue Frankfurt’ (Autumn 2023)
Diploma Studio ‘To Adapt + Produce’ (Spring 2023, with Chair of Architecture and Housing, Prof. Maria Conen)
Research Studio ‘Zurich’s Land Commons’ (Autumn 2022)
Seminar Course ‘The City Lived: Sites-and-Services’ (Autumn 2022)
Research Studio ‘Zurich’s Material Commons’ (Spring 2022)
Seminar Week ‘Material Circulation and the City’ (Spring 2022)
Online Exhibitions
Swiss Coloniality and Its Industrial Architectures (2024)
Sites-and-Services: The Minimal Urban Design of a Major 1970-80s Housing Paradigm (2023)
Selected Publications as Editor
Sebastiaan Loosen, Erik Sigge & Helena Mattsson, “Architecture in the Foreign Aid-Funded Knowledge Economy”, double theme issue of ABE Journal. Architecture Beyond Europe (Part 1, Summer 2023; Part 2, Winter 2023). doi:10.4000/abe.14412, doi:10.4000/abe.15311.
Sebastiaan Loosen, Rajesh Heynickx & Hilde Heynen, The Figure of Knowledge. Conditioning Architectural Theory, 1960s-1990s (Leuven University Press, 2020).
doi:10.11116/9789461663221.
Hilde Heynen & Sebastiaan Loosen, “Marxism and Architectural Theory across the East-West Divide”, Special Collection of Architectural Histories 6-7 (2018-2019).
doi:10.5334/ah.401.
Selected Publications as Author
Sebastiaan Loosen, “Euclid in Ivory Coast: Architecture and Modern Education as Swiss Export, 1975-1976”, in Staying with Modernity? (Dis)Entangling Coloniality and Architecture (Delft/Rotterdam: Jaap Bakema Study Centre, 2024), pp. 92-98. https://nieuweinstituut.nl/.
Sebastiaan Loosen, “Mr. Dennis’ Model: Organizing Knowledge in the Postcolonial Era”, in Anna-Maria Meister et al. (eds.), Are You A Model? On an Architectural Medium of Spatial Exploration (Berlin: Jovis Verlag, 2024), pp. 44-48. doi:10.1515/9783986120733-011.
Sebastiaan Loosen, Viviana d’Auria & Hilde Heynen, “‘The City as a Housing Project’: Training for Human Settlements at the Leuven PGCHS in the 1970s-1980s”, in: Aggregate (ed.), Architecture in Development. Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (New York: Routledge, 2022), pp. 123-140.
doi:10.4324/9781003193654-9.
Sebastiaan Loosen, “The Challenge of the Poetic: Criticism in Search of the Real – with a Debt to bOb Van Reeth, 1975-1985”, CLARA Architecture/Recherche, no. 7: Critique architecturale et débat public, ed. by Hélène Jannière & Paolo Scrivano (2020), pp. 106-121.
doi:10.3917/clara.007.0106.
Sebastiaan Loosen, “Troubled Dialogues: Intellectuality at a Crossroads at the Carrefour de l’Europe in Brussels”, in: Loosen, Heynickx & Heynen (eds.), The Figure of Knowledge (2020, op. cit.), pp. 127-142.
doi:10.2307/j.ctv16x2c28.8.
Łukasz Stanek, interviewed by Hilde Heynen & Sebastiaan Loosen, “Cold War History beyond the Cold War Discourse: A Conversation with Łukasz Stanek”, Architectural Histories 7 (2019), art. 19, pp. 1-10.
doi:10.5334/ah.435.
Sebastiaan Loosen & Hilde Heynen, “Secularized Engagement in Architecture: Sieg Vlaeminck’s Plea for Woonecologie in 1970s Flanders”, International Journal for History, Culture and Modernity 6 (2018), pp. 1-37.
doi:10.18352/hcm.516.
Sebastiaan Loosen, “‘Le monopole du passéisme’: A Left-Historicist Critique of Late Capitalism in Brussels”, in: Ákos Moravánszky et al. (eds.), East West Central: Re-Building Europe, 1950-1990, vol. 3: Moravánszky & Torsten Lange (eds.), Re-framing Identities: Architecture’s Turn to History, 1970-1990 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2016), pp. 261-274.
doi:10.1515/9783035608151-017.