News

After a successful period in her function as Vice Dean of the Institute of Architecture, we are pleased to announce that Rector Gerald Bast has appointed Baerbel Mueller as its Dean, as of October 1, succeeding Klaus Bollinger.

Baerbel Mueller is an architect and researcher based in Austria and Ghana. She is associate professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and head of the [applied] Foreign Affairs lab at the Institute of Architecture, which investigates spatial, environmental and cultural phenomena in rural and urban Sub‐​Saharan Africa and the Middle‐​East, and founder of nav_​s baerbel mueller [navigations in the field of architecture and urban research within diverse cultural contexts], with a focus on projects located on the African continent since 2002. She graduated with honors from the Institute of Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. From 2002 to 2011, she has been teaching at I oA´s Studio Wolf D. Prix, directing student realization projects and transdisciplinary courses. Between 2013 and 2014 she was also professor at the New Design University in St. Pölten, Austria. Her work comprises architecture, urban research, installations, scenography, and curatorial projects, and has been widely shown; e.g. at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Marrakech Biennial, the Architekturmuseum Pinakothek Munich, and AzW Vienna. She received various prizes, and several Austrian state grants. She was awarded the Austrian Ars Docendi State Award for excellence in teaching (2015), edited [applied] Foreign Affairs – investigation spatial phenomena in rural and urban Sub-Saharan Africa (2017) and Structures of Displacement (2020), co-designed Nubuke Extended, a widely publicized campus project and arts gallery in Accra (2019), and co-curated the exhibition Ecologies & Politics of the Living (Vienna Biennale 2021). She is co-editor of forA on the urban (2021-).