• 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)

Housing Waste: Recycling Industrial By-Products into Construction, and the Globalisation of Building Research

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

Since the late nineteenth century, the production of the built environment became a field of scientific and industrial transformation, driven in part by a new type of modernising institution: the building research laboratory. 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). This project examines a recurring agenda across these globally dispersed institutions: turning industrial by-products (‘waste products’) into raw materials for construction.

Revalorising bagasse, wood chips, blast-furnace slag, fly ash, mine tailings, sulphur, and other residual substances has been an important contribution of building science to reducing the cost of housing and infrastructure production. In the twentieth century, such research emerged to mitigate material shortages and economic crises resulting from war, support the autarkic ambitions of local industries and state administrations, and reduce dependence on volatile and increasingly globalised resource markets. Building a research agenda around waste recycling fostered new relationships between construction and other industrial sectors, increasing the efficiency and speed of building production, but also resource consumption, emissions, and waste generation.

The project sets out to understand the extent to which the built environment has thereby been turned into a ‘sink’ for increasingly diverse and unpredictable substances. It asks who benefited from this process, whose problems of scarcity or waste disposal it solved, and what adverse consequences it produced for the human and non-human inhabitants of the resulting environments. It will result in my second monographic book, which aims to develop a global history of industrial waste through the built environment, firmly anchoring the history of construction within a broader environmental history of the Anthropocene.

Circular Reconstruction: Rubble, Labor, and Rebuilding of Warsaw after 1945

First Book, forthcoming 2027/2028

The history of Warsaw, the capital of Poland, was fundamentally reshaped in the 20^th century by the violence of imperialist and industrial warfare. During the German occupation (1939–1945), over half of the city’s population perished, and 85% of its buildings were destroyed. Once a major metropolis of Eastern Europe, Warsaw was transformed into an alien landscape of destruction, defined by thousands of irreparable buildings and 40 million tonnes of debris. The Circular Reconstruction explores how the materiality of this environment shaped Warsaw’s postwar history. Drawing on a wealth of hitherto unexplored archival sources, the book traces the metabolism that bound together society, ruins, and the socialist government during the reconstruction period. It demonstrates how, alongside the labour of inhabitants, architects, and economic planners, rubble influenced postwar property relations, industrial organisation, material expertise, and Warsaw’s architecture and landscape. Simultaneously, the study shows how the socialist government harnessed the planned economy to maximise rubble reuse, enabling Warsaw's rebuilding under conditions of extreme shortages and stagnation. The resulting analysis foregrounds the relationship between rubble and labour as a key conceptual and methodological framework for understanding the social, economic, and political life that emerged in built environments fundamentally reshaped by modern armed conflict. At the same time, by centring practices of maintenance, repair, and reuse, The Circular Reconstruction provides a vital historical context for contemporary urban and architectural development, which now faces a proliferation of rubble far exceeding that of past and present wars.

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

Book Manuscripts

Przywara, Adam. Circular Reconstruction: Rubble, Labor, and Rebuilding Warsaw after 1945. Book manuscript under review at Minnesota University Press. 

Refereed Articles

Przywara, Adam. 2026. “From ruins to resource: recycling rubble in the socialist reconstruction of Warsaw.” The Journal of Architecture, August, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2026.2706572.

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.

Journal Special Issue

Kobi, Madlen, Adam Przywara, and Elena Sischarenco, eds. “Circular Cities: Motivations, Challenges and Prospects of Building Material Reuse in Urban Contexts.” Special issue, Urban Research & Practice 19, no. 1 (2026).
 
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.

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.