Nikolai Brandes

Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich

Nikolai Brandes is an architectural historian at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. His current research interests include the history of architecture in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, the work of East German architects abroad, and the history of architecture schools in Africa. He studied political science in Berlin and Coimbra. In his doctoral thesis at the Freie Universität Berlin, he examined cooperative housing construction in late colonial Mozambique and elaborated a critique of the persistence of Lusotropical discourses in contemporary Portuguese architectural history. He deepened his expertise on the region in the FKK-funded Middle Class Urbanism research group at the National Museum of Denmark. He was a fellow of the COST project European Architecture Beyond Europe in Ghent, at the German Historical Institute in Rome and at Technical University Dresden. He has received funding from Heinrich Böll Foundation and from the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony. His most recent articles have appeared in Cities, Bauwelt and Dérive.

During his time in Cape Town, he has been exploring the cooperation between scientific and artistic disciplines practiced at the CHR and is looking for conversations with local experts in architecture and urban planning.