• History of built and ruined environments since the 19th century (postwar ruins and rubble, industrial by-products and residues, consumer waste)
• Socialist reconstruction and planned economy in Central and Eastern Europe after 1945
• Professional knowledge and scientific expertise around resource and energy conservation in architecture; sustainable construction technologies
• Practices of maintenance, repair, reuse, recycling, and landfilling of building materials (including contemporary reorientation toward circular economy in construction)

Containment, or Contamination? Recycling Waste into Construction, and the Globalization of Building Research

Second Book Project, Europainstitut, University of Basel (2025–2030)

Since the late nineteenth century, the production of building materials has shifted from craft-based knowledge to scientific and industrial expertise. This transformation was driven by a new type of public institution within the modernizing state: the building research laboratory. First established in Central and Western Europe, such laboratories expanded rapidly across the Second and Third Worlds after 1945. Notable examples include the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (1880), the UK’s Building Research Station (1921), the Polish Building Research Institute (1945), and India’s Central Building Research Institute (1947).

Their proliferation rested on powerful promises: increasing resource and energy efficiency in material production, reducing construction costs, and enabling new forms of affordable housing and infrastructure. At the core of most laboratories was a shared agenda I describe as the “revalorisation of waste”—the scientific search for productive uses of industrial and agricultural residues. From blast-furnace slag and fly ash to sulphur, engineers engaged with the challenge of transforming waste into value, i.e. building materials. This “alchemical” premise secured sustained state investment, generated new forms of technical expertise, and directly shaped the built environment across the globe in both planned and entirely unexpected ways.

This project sets out to illuminate how, since the mid-nineteenth century, the built environment has been remade into a sink for mounting industrial waste. The investigation scrutinises the experts and institutional actors driving this process, drawing on archival collections of building research institutes in Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom, Poland, India, and South Africa. Through these archival sources, the project aims to offer a critical assessment of the economic impact of this agenda, as well as its environmental legacies.

Circular Reconstruction: Reuse, Recycling, and Landfilling in Postwar Architecture

First Book, forthcoming 2026/2027

Circular Reconstruction offers a historical account of a distinct form of architectural production emergent in times of economic crisis, scarcity, and exhaustion. Based on a wealth of previously unpublished visual and written sources, the book examines how 40 million tons of rubble scattered across Warsaw after the Second World War became the material basis for the postwar reconstruction of the city. Following inhabitants, workers, architects, engineers, and politicians as they engaged in reuse, recycling, and landfilling, the book offers direct insight into a fully developed circular economy in construction. In this way, it bridges past and present moments in which architecture again confronts war-induced ruination and resource depletion under accelerating climate change.

Adam Przywara is an architectural historian, curator, and postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for European Global Studies at the University of Basel, Switzerland. He holds an MA in Architectural History and Theory from The Bartlett, UCL, and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Manchester. His doctoral thesis received two of the most prestigious awards in the field: the Theodor Fischer Award (2024) and the SAH David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award (2025). He has curated numerous architectural exhibitions, including the major historical show Rising from Rubble: Warsaw 1945–1949 (Museum of Warsaw), which received the Architectural Prize of the Mayor of Warsaw. He is currently finalising his first monograph, Circular Reconstruction: Reuse, Recycling, Landfilling in Postwar Architecture (forthcoming 2027). In Basel, Adam is developing his second book-length project, which explores how, since the mid-19th century, the built environment has come to serve as a sink for industrial residues and pollution.

Education

2022 — PhD in Architecture, University of Manchester (passed without corrections)
2016 — MPhil Architectural History, The Bartlett, UCL (Distinction)
2015 — BA History of Art, University of Warsaw

Academic Positions

2025–Present — Postdoctoral Researcher, SNSF project The Battle of Materials, Institute for European Global Studies
2023–2025 — Postdoctoral Researcher, SNSF project Urban Bricolage, Social Anthropology Unit, 

University of Fribourg
2019–2021 — Teaching Assistant, Department of Architecture, University of Manchester

Museum Exhibitions

2023 — Warsaw 1945–1949: Rising from Rubble, curator, Museum of Warsaw
2029 — See You After the Revolution. 100 Years of Bauhaus, co-curator, Arsenal Gallery, Białystok
2018 — The Art of Joining: Designing the Universal Connector, co-curator, Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau

Awards

2025 — SAH David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award, Society of Architectural Historians
2024 — Theodor Fischer Award, Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte
2023 — Architectural Award of the Mayor of Warsaw

Fellowships

2025 — Theories of Architecture Fellowship, TU Delft
2024 — Travel Grant, Swiss Academy of Humanities and Social Sciences
2020 — Research Fellowship, Deutsches Historisches Institut, Warsaw
2018 — Bauhaus Lab Fellow, Bauhaus Foundation, Dessau

Most publications are available at: adamprzywara.com

Books

Przywara, Adam. Circular Reconstruction: Reuse, Recycling, and Landfilling in Postwar Architecture. Forthcoming 2026/2027.

Edited Volumes

Przywara, Adam, ed. 2023. Zgruzowstanie: Przeszłość i przyszłość ruin w architekturze [Past and Future of Ruins in Architecture]. Warsaw: Museum of Warsaw.
Denny, Paul, and Adam Przywara, eds. 2018. The Art of Joining: Designing the Universal Connector. Leipzig: Spector Books.

Journal Special Issues

Kobi, Madlen, Elena Sischarenco, and Adam Przywara, eds. 2025. “Urban Circularity in Practice.” Urban Research and Practice (special issue, expected 2026).

Refereed Articles

Przywara, Adam. 2025. “Wartime Circularity: Adapting Buildings, Salvaging Materials, and Designing Supply Chains for Ukraine.” Urban Research and Practice, October, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17535069.2025.2571101.

Kobi, Madlen, and Adam Przywara. 2025. “Circular Economy as Human-Material Relation: Understanding the Reuse of Building Materials through Historical Sources and Ethnographic Data.” Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History 21 (1): 57–80. https://doi.org/10.14765/zzf.dok-2864.
Przywara, Adam. 2024. “Mining for Embodied Coal: Building Material Reuse in the Postwar Reconstruction of Warsaw.” Ardeth 13: 141–59. https://doi.org/10.17454/ARDETH13.09.

In Review

Przywara, Adam. 2025. “From Rubble to Resource: Recycling in the Socialist Reconstruction of Warsaw.” Submitted to The Journal of Architecture.

Book Chapters

Przywara, Adam. 2025. “Afterlife or Rebirth? Warsaw in the 1940s.” In Gewalt ausstellen: Erste Ausstellungen zur NS-Besatzung in Europa, 1945–1948, edited by Anna Pietrasik and Rebekka Gross, 121–29. Berlin: Ch. Links Verlag.
Przywara, Adam. 2023. “R for Rubble.” In Wastiary: A Bestiary of Waste, edited by Miriam Picard et al., 72–74. London: UCL Press.
Przywara, Adam. 2023. “Historia przemiany gruzów w architekturę powojennej stolicy.” In Zgruzowstanie, edited by Adam Przywara, 40–110. Warsaw: Museum of Warsaw.
Denny, Paul, and Adam Przywara. 2018. “Frontiers of Prefabrication / Prefabrication on Frontiers.” In The Art of Joining: Designing the Universal Connector, edited by Paul Denny and Adam Przywara, 45–63. Leipzig: Spector Books.

Commissioned Essays

Przywara, Adam. 2025. “The Right to Ruins.” e-flux Architecture (Framing Renovations). https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/framing-renovation/672006/the-right-to-ruins.
Devlieger, Lionel, Michael Ghyoot, Arne Vande Capelle, Karen Steukers, Louise Vanhee, and Adam Przywara. 2025. “Circular Design Principles: Between Theory and Practice.” e-flux Architecture (Chronograms of Architecture). https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/chronograms/665748/circular-design-principles-between-theory-and-practice.
Przywara, Adam. 2025. “Salvage for Ukraine.” The Architectural Review, May, 26–30.
Przywara, Adam. 2024. “Rubble with a Cause.” The Architectural Review, September, 16–25.