Mara Eskinazi

Mara Eskinazi’s academic and professional expertise spans architecture and urbanism with an emphasis on architectural design as well as theory, history, and criticism of architecture, focused primarily on housing, modern architecture, particularly in the 1950s, continuity and criticism of modernity, the foundation and conception of architectural design, façades and architectural devices for environmental control.

She holds a Ph.D. in Urbanism from Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)’s Graduate Program in Urbanism and conducted doctoral research at the Institut für Architektur of the Technische Universität Berlin (2011-2012). She earned her master’s in architecture from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Porto Alegre, Brazil. In 2022-2023, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar and postdoctoral researcher at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, under the supervision of Professor Jean-Louis Cohen.

She has been teaching at UFRJ since 2011 and is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism and the Graduate Program in Urbanism. At the undergraduate level, she teaches architectural design studios. She is a member of the Urbanism, Criticism, and Architecture Group at the university’s Graduate Program in Urbanism, where she also teaches and leads the research project “The Façade as an Interface: Design Repertoire,” which examines multi-family residential architecture in Rio de Janeiro through its façade plans. She is also a member of the research group “Design Teaching and Research: The Production of Modern and Contemporary Architecture” at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. She is currently working on the book Irmãos Roberto: Architectures for a City, which examines the residential buildings the brothers designed for Rio de Janeiro, focusing on the architectural design strategies that highlight the buildings’ urban dimension.