Dr Torsten Schmiedeknecht

Personal Statement

I studied architecture at TU Darmstadt in Germany, and the Polytechnic of Central London, and I was registered as an architect in the UK for 20 years.
Before taking a full-time post at Liverpool, I taught part-time at Kingston and Liverpool, and worked in practice in Germany, the UK, France and Greece.
My research interests are the representation of architecture, mainly in print media; architectural competitions; and rationalism in C20 architecture, and my PhD thesis, for which initial research was funded by the AHRC, was on the German competition journal Wettbewerbe Aktuell.
I have instigated and co-edited two volumes on C20 rationalism (Rationalist Traces, with Andrew Peckham and Charles Rattray, 2007; The Rationalist Reader, with Andrew Peckham, 2014), two volumes on the relationship between fame and architecture (Fame and Architecture, with Julia Chance, 2001; An Architect's Guide to Fame, with Paul Davies, 2005), one volume on the relationship between architecture journals and modernism (Modernism and the Professional Architecture Journal - Reporting, editing and reconstructing in postwar Europe, with Andrew Peckham, 2018), as well as the book Building Children's Worlds - The Representation of Architecture and Modernity in Picturebooks (with Jill Rudd and Emma Hayward, 2023). Having won a Research Trust Award (RIBA), I curated the exhibition Building Children's Worlds at the RIBA in Liverpool (2019).