dirk de meyer

Biography

Dirk De Meyer is professor in History of Architecture and Architectural Design at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University, Belgium. From 2003 till 2005 he was Chief Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

After his training as an engineer-architect at Ghent University he studied architectural history at the IUAV (Venice). He holds a Ph.D. from TUEindhoven. He held study residencies in Prague and Rome, and was a Visiting Scholar at CCA. He is a founder of the interdisciplinary research team GUST (Ghent Urban Studies Team), and was the Director of IRHA, the Institut de Recherche en Histoire de l’Architecture, an interuniversity research organization based in Montréal.

His major research areas are: eighteenth-century European architecture and its relation to culture, sciences and politics; the historiography of the architecture of the 16th through mid-eighteenth centuries, its impact on twentieth century architecture, and its relationship to cultural and political issues, including nationalism; architecture collections, their development, conservation and communication.

He is the author of books, such as Johann Santini Aichel: architectuur en ambiguiteit; Piranesi: de prentencollectie van de Universiteit Gent, and The Urban Condition: Space, Community and Self in the Contemporary Metropolis. He contributed to books published by a.o. the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (München), Electa (Milano) and the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (Paris). He contributed to journals such as the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Architecture, Casabella, Disegno d’Architettura and SanRocco. He has curated international exhibitions in Belgium, Prague and Montréal, on aspects of Baroque architecture in Italy and Central Europe, and on Piranesi.

He has lectured at various universities and research centres, including: Columbia University, New York; UC Berkeley; I.I.T, Chicago; University of Miami; McGill University, and CCA, Montreal; University of Toronto; Sendai Mediatheque (Japan); IUAV, Venice; Politecnico di Milano; Stiftung Bibliothek Werner Oechslin, Einsiedeln.

He has served as a jury member in various international architecture competitions, and on the advisory boards for grants and prizes. He is on the board of the peer-reviewed journals Oase, Journal for Architecture (Rotterdam) and Città & Storia (Roma), and is a member of ICAM, the International Confederation of Architectural Museums.

He speaks and lectures fluently in Dutch, French, English and Italian. He reads and understands German, and has unfortunately lost most of his notions of Czech.

 

Bibliography

https://biblio.ugent.be/person/801000641772