Manuel Herz

An architect and a professor of urban studies, Manuel Herz’s research focuses on the relationship between planning and (state) power. He has published two successful books: From Camp to City – Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara (2013), documenting how camps can be spaces of social emancipation as well as institutional prefiguration; and African Modernism. The Architecture of Independence (2015), which deals with the architecture of African countries at the time of their independence in the 1960s and 1970s. The accompanying exhibition is currently travelling to cities across Europe, the US and sub-Saharan Africa. Herz curated and designed the National Pavilion of the Western Sahara at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2016), and his projects have received several prizes, including the German Façade Prize (2011), the Cologne Architecture Prize (2003), the German Architecture Prize for Concrete (2004) and a nomination for the Mies van der Rohe Prize for European Architecture (2011).