Frederik Braüner
2026-28 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow
Project: "Building a Modern High North: The Colonial and Transnational Construction of Modernity in the Arctic"
While at the Buell, Braüner will work on his book project, Building a Modern High North: The Colonial and Transnational Construction of Modernity in the Arctic. This work, which builds on Braüner's dissertation, examines how architecture and urban planning functioned as tools of colonial expansion and welfare governance across the Global High North, tracing the transnational collaborations among colonial administrations in Sápmi, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, Nunavut, and Alaska to reveal how colonial legacies of modernity continue to shape contemporary life in this rapidly changing region
Biography: Frederik Braüner is an architect, editor, and historian of modern and contemporary architecture. His research focuses on the overlapping histories of colonialism, welfare ideologies, and high-modernist spatial practices, particularly in the Arctic and the broader Circumpolar North. Braüner holds a PhD in Architecture with a designated emphasis in European and Scandinavian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley; an MA in Political Architecture from the Royal Danish Academy; and a BA in Art History from the University of Copenhagen. His research has been supported by several awards and fellowships, including from the Danish Ministry of Higher Education and Science, the Arcus Foundation, and the Society of Architectural Historians. Braüner previously worked as an architect and editor for the architectural journals Arkitekten and Room One Thousand. His writing has appeared in academic and popular journals such as Architecture and Culture, Magasin for Bygningskunst og Kultur, and Information.
Chelsea Spencer
2025-27 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow
Project: "The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building"
While at the Buell, Spencer will work on her current book project, The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building. This work, which builds on Spencer’s dissertation, traces how building became contracting in the United States during the nineteenth century. General contractors dismantled the world of craft building and reconstituted it as the modern construction industry, thus laying the foundations of modern American architecture by operating at the inflection point between projection and materialization, paper and concrete. General contractors offered their investment-minded clients a completed building, for a fixed price, on a guaranteed schedule. Unearthing the ideological and institutional foundations of today’s construction industry, the study reveals how nineteenth-century thinking about freedom, value, and risk shaped the architectural building contract and the limits of the architecture profession.
Biography: Chelsea Spencer is an architectural historian and editor. Her research examines the practice and production of architecture—broadly construed—in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, with a particular focus on architecture’s interactions with technical media, law, and economic life. Spencer received a PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT, an MDes from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BA from Emory University. Before joining Columbia she was a CERCL postdoctoral fellow in architecture at Rice University. She has taught writing at the Pratt Institute and was previously the managing editor of Log. Her writing can be found in Grey Room, Places, and Log, among others.