Meredith TenHoor: Architectural History in Paris and Brooklyn

This academic year, TenHoor is on leave from Pratt as a Fellow in Princeton University's Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism and the Humanities. Her primary focus is to complete a book about the modernization of food systems in 20th-century France. She is organizing a colloquium in the spring focused on theories of infrastructure developed by activists, architects, social psychologists in France in the 1960s and 70s. She is also working on an "activist history project" on the recent history of toxic building materials, working collaboratively with an architectural historian, Laura Diamond Dixit, to "make architects more aware of the ecological and social impacts of using materials that often have invisible forms of toxicity."

TenHoor began her career in architecture at Princeton, where she enrolled in graduate school after several years working as a software architect/interface designer in the dot-com boom of the late 90s and early 00s. Outside of her software job, TenHoor was interested in the societal impacts of technological change, and in her spare time she was making documentaries about urban change. She felt that software designers were not critical or informed enough about the ways their work would be used, and decided to pursue academic work which would allow her to research and write about these issues. As she began her studies in the history of architecture at Princeton, she "loved it and found it fascinating, especially the history of architectural history, because of its long history of theorizing on the relationships between design and use."

Even as an undergraduate, TenHoor had done a lot of writing about food and food consumption; she also had been interested in French critical theory by thinkers like Michel Foucalt, Jacque Derrida, Félix Guattari, and Gilles Deleuze, who had been writing about networks in society. Early in her graduate coursework, TenHoor realized that she could connect the history of this theory and the history of physical networks, and focused her research on networks for distributing food. Her dissertation addressed the Marché d’Intérêt National de Paris-Rungis, the world’s largest wholesale food market, which was built in the suburbs of Paris in the late 1960s after the modernization and closing of the largest market in central Paris at Les Halles. "Unlike in the U.S., it is an incredibly powerful central node in the food supply. If you eat in a restaurant or buy food from anywhere but the largest grocery chains in Paris, chances are your food has passed through Rungis."

TenHoor began teaching at Pratt part-time while completing her dissertation research, and took a full-time position in 2012. At Pratt, she coordinates a team of fourteen faculty members who teach undergraduate architectural history and theory. Teaching architectural history is a requirement for accreditation in schools of architecture, and TenHoor sees this as a great strength of architectural education, especially in comparison to the software and technology industry where she previously worked. She believes that teaching history and theory enables students "to think about the ethics of what they're making" and to "understand the history of their discipline," which "allows for more creative and well thought-out designs" than you would see in other disciplines. In her time at Pratt, TenHoor has also worked to diversify the curriculum to make it "less Euro-centric and more globally focused, addressing the systematic exclusion of women and people of color from the way that architectural history was traditionally taught in the U.S."