Tamar Zinguer is an architect, architectural historian, and educator whose work centers on the pedagogy of design, tracing its evolution across time, scale, and disciplinary boundaries. From objects to landscapes, she explores themes of construction and destruction, weaving these concerns through both her teaching and research. Her approach situates architecture within a broader cultural matrix, engaging art history, technology, literature, and sociology to illuminate the discipline’s shifting meanings.
Her book Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys (University of Virginia Press, 2015) examines how playthings over the past two centuries have mirrored changing attitudes toward form, structure, and permanence. These toys not only echo modernist design experiments but also reflect technological innovations in their construction systems.
Her forthcoming book, Sandbox: An Architectural History (MIT Press), traces the sandbox from its origins in 19th-century Berlin as a pedagogical tool, through its global adoption in postwar urban regeneration, to its decline—dismissed as unsanitary—and eventual reemergence as a motif in land art. The study reveals how this seemingly simple space has carried complex cultural and spatial meanings across time.
Zinguer is also developing a second manuscript, Architecture Degree Zero, which investigates how critics and historians have used the concept of “degree zero” to describe architecture. Through this lens, she explores various expressions of minimalism and emptiness, asking whether an engagement with zero—the numerical embodiment of nothingness—might reshape a discipline increasingly marked by formal complexity.
Her scholarship has been supported by fellowships from the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Smithsonian Institution, the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention, the Barre-Ferree Foundation, and others. She holds a B.Arch. from The Cooper Union, an M.Sc. in Architecture from the Technion–Israel Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. in History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University. Zinguer has served as a Visiting Critic at Cornell, Columbia, and Princeton, and spent 16 years as a full-time faculty member at The Cooper Union in New York City.
