Dr. Tamar Zinguer is an architect, architectural historian, and educator, who explores the pedagogy of design through history and across scales. From the level of the object to the landscape, she considers aspects of construction and destruction in all her work—teaching and research.
Her first book, Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys (University of Virginia Press, 2015), followed architectural toys, blocks, and construction sets, which provided evidence of the social and economic life of their period, and incorporated technological changes in their ‘systems of construction.’ Designed by adults for children, these toys echoed full-scale experimentations, presented an intersection between generations, and a meeting point between pedagogy and means of production. In the intimacy of the domestic environment, architectural toys intimated notions of the modern. Architecture in Play won the CHOICE Library award in 2017 and was favorably reviewed in leading journals.
Zinguer’s current book manuscript, Sandbox: An Architectural History of Play, follows the sandbox, how and it was invented, the pedagogy it inscribed and its various applications. Her book follows this very “public” space—it is almost always shared—whose nature has shifted with time, from containing an exuberant crowd of children, to becoming an empty space, a memorial. Zinguer follows the qualities of this play-scape, how it built communities through play. Studying landscape architecture, geography, and land art, she traces an influential urban/sub-urban discourse in architecture, mediating between the individual and the city, between the artist and the child. Zinguer received numerous fellowships from the University of Oklahoma to conduct research in archives in the US and abroad, has lectured widely on the subject, and has published different parts of the book manuscript, in Journal of Architectural Education JAE, Material Culture, and in a compilation of articles entitled, What is a Model? (Meister ed., Jovis Verlag 2024).
Zinguer’s second book manuscript in progress, “Architecture Degree Zero,” follows architectural historians and critics who used the expression “degree zero” in relation to architecture. This research—supported by a Visiting Scholar Fellowship from the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal—led her to relate architecture to literary criticism on the one hand, and to the history of mathematics on the other. She asks, could an interest in zero—the numeric embodiment of emptiness—inform and change the output of a discipline whose manifestations have lately become more and more complicated? Zinguer presented parts of the project at SAH, CCA, and invited conferences to celebrate the centenary of the birth of Bruno Zevi, at the GSD and the Technion, publishing a chapter in a compilation of articles in Zevi’s honor.
Before coming to the University of Oklahoma, in August 2021, Zinguer was on the full-time faculty at The Cooper Union, NYC for 16 years where she taught design studios across the curriculum, as well as lecture courses and seminars. At OU, Zinguer heads the first-year architectural design curriculum, leading a team who teaches approximately one hundred and twenty incoming students. As an educator, Zinguer leads a process of discovery, carving out for students a space where curiosity and invention can take place, and often engaging the community in her seminars. In the last two years Zinguer received Excellence in Teaching Awards at OU from the Gibbs College of Architecture, as well as from the Division of Architecture.
Zinguer has received numerous fellowships, including support from Princeton University, The Canadian Center for Architecture, The Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention at the Smithsonian, the Barre-Ferree Foundation, and more. She was trained as an architect at The Cooper Union (B.Arch), earned an M.Sc in Architecture from Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and an MA and PhD from Princeton University School of Architecture.
