Jose Lira

José T. Lira is professor at the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the University of São Paulo (FAU-USP). He used to be a research affiliate of the Brazilian National Council of Research (CNPq, 1999–2014) and directed USP’s Center for Cultural Preservation (CPC-USP, 2010–2014). His PhD dissertation (FAU-USP, 1997) explores the connections between housing debates, urban culture, and architectural and planning discourses in Recife, Brazil, in the first half of the twentieth century. His post-doctoral research (Tese de Livre Docência, FAU-USP, 2008) focuses on the life and work of Ukrainian avant-garde architect Gregori Warchavchik (1896–1972) in Brazil from the 1920s to the 1950s. He has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (2009) and at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris—Malaquais (2015), as well as a visiting professor in the Program in Latin American Studies and the School of Architecture at Princeton University (2020). He is the author of O visível e o invísivel na arquitetura brasileira/The visible and the invisible in Brazilian architecture (2017) and Warchavchik: Fraturas da vanguarda (2011); coeditor of Domesticidade, gênero e cultura material (2017), Patrimônio construído da USP: Políticas de proteção, gestão e memória (2014), Memória, trabalho e arquitetura (2013), and São Paulo: Os estrangeiros e a construção das cidades (2011); and contributor to numerous books and journals, writing on architectural and planning history and criticism; modernism, architecture, and the city; Brazilian social thinking; housing history; architecture’s material production; and ethnicity, gender, and sexuality in architecture and urbanism.