Team

Oliver Sukrow has been a research associate at the Department of ATW at TU Darmstadt since 2023.

He studied art history and Baltic studies in Greifswald, Salzburg and Colchester from 2005-2011. From 2012-2016 he was a PhD student at the Institute for European Art History at the University of Heidelberg and from 2014-2016 Baden-Württemberg Fellow at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich. In 2016-2020, he was a university assistant at the Research Department of Art History at the Vienna University of Technology. In 2018, his PhD thesis was published under the title "Arbeit. Living. Computer - On Utopia in the Visual Arts and Architecture of the GDR in the 1960s" by Heidelberg University Press and in the same year the anthology he edited "Zwischen Sputnik und Ölkrise. Cybernetics in Architecture, Planning and Design" by DOM Publishers, Berlin. Together with the Wüstenrot Foundation, the documentation volume on the restored mural by Josep Renau in Thuringia was published in 2020. In 2021, the anniversary volume on the "Haus der Kultur Gera" (sphere publishers), which he edited, was published and received the DAM Architectural Book Award.

His post-doctoral project deals with health resorts in the 19th and 20th centuries as alternative spaces of innovation, focusing in particular on the relationship between architecture, landscape and medicine. This project was funded by the Botstiber Institute for Austrian-American Studies, among others.

From 2020 to October 2023, he is still a National Research Partner (PostDoc) in the FWF third-party funded project "Transnational School Construction: Austria, Slovenia, GDR" at the Research Department of Art History at TU Vienna. He was a Fellow of the Wüstenrot Foundation and the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. Oliver Sukrow is a member of the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS Austria) and Monitor for the serial UNESCO World Heritage Site "The Great Spa Towns of Europe" (Baden near Vienna).

His main research interests include the history of art and architecture in the GDR, the relationship between utopia and architecture, and the history and design of landscape from a cultural studies perspective.