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About

Barry Bergdoll

Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology, Department of Art History and Achaelogy, Columbia University

Governing Board Member, SOF/Heyman, Columbia University (2005–2006)

Headshot of Barry Bergdoll

Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. Until 2013 he was the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art. Bergdoll received his PhD in Art History from Columbia in 1986. Professor Bergdoll's broad interests center on modern architectural history, with a particular emphasis on France and Germany between 1750 and 1900. Trained in art history rather than architecture, he has an approach most closely allied with cultural history and the history and sociology of professions. He has studied questions of the politics of cultural representation in architecture, the larger ideological content of nineteenth-century architectural theory, and the changing role of both architecture as a profession and architecture as a cultural product in nineteenth-century European society. Professor Bergdoll's interests also include the intersections of architecture and new technologies—and eventually cultures—of representations in the modern period, especially photography and film. He has worked on several film productions about architecture, in addition to curating a number of architectural exhibitions concerned with the history and problematics of exhibiting architecture, and the history of museological practices in relationship to architecture. His publications include European Architecture 1750-1890 (Oxford University Press, 2000), as well as the curated exhibit Mies in Berlin at the Museum of Modern Art in 2001.