Anna Myjak-Pycia

Anna Myjak-Pycia is an architectural historian working on modern architecture, in particular the history of interiors: their design, the way they have been experienced, and the methods of examining them. She is a senior researcher at the gta, ETH Zürich. In the past, she was Dean’s Fellow at the College of Human Ecology, Cornell University. She taught at Tufts University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of California. She worked as the editor of the Bulletin of the Polish Children’s Fund and of the humanities journal, Animus; her editorial work was recognized with the award of the Polish Society of Regional Press.

In 2018, she received a Ph.D. in History of Art and Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a dissertation on modernism and the Home Economics movement; for her dissertation she received the Mallory Award. She also studied art history at Tufts University and literature at the University of Warsaw.

Recently, Anna has been carrying out the research project "Beyond the Visual: Towards an Inclusive Architectural History" that concentrates on the non-visual realm of the twentieth-century interior in Europe and the US. It examines this realm by attending to the interior's material and technological aspects, and the way they are registered by the people's perception: the sensations of sound, touch, smell, warmth, cold, various humidity levels, the freshness and stuffiness of air, as well as the experience of movement, comfort, and fatigue. In the years 2022-2024, the project was funded by the NOMIS Foundation. 

Her recent publications include a book, Another Modernism: Home Economics and the Design of Domestic Space in the US, 1900-1960, published with Bloomsbury Press, and articles in journals: "The Peripheral Interior and People as Infrastructure: Adopting the Sewer System for Passage" in The Journal of Architecture, "Home as an Aid: Domestic Design for Disabled Polio Survivors" in Journal of Design History, and "Forgoing the Architect’s Vision: American Home Economists as Pioneers of Participatory Design, 1930-60" in Architectural Research Quarterly. Earlier, she published three books (two co-authored) and dozens of articles on architecture, arts, literature, history, and music. One of her essays received an award from the Moral Re-Armament (MRA) International.

Selected publications: https://arch.ethz.ch/en/utils/search.MjQ3MDIx.html