Henriette Steiner

Kort præsentation

Henriette Steiner is Professor in the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning and Society at the University of Copenhagen where she currently serves as Head of Section. She gained her PhD in Architecture in 2008 from the University of Cambridge, UK, and was Research Associate in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich in Switzerland for five years. She has been a visiting Associate Professor at the Department for Urban Studies and Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), in 2021 she was Visiting Professor at the Institute of Landscape Architecture at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences (BOKU) in Vienna and in 2024 at the University of Geneva.

Henriette works on the history and philosophy of architecture, landscapes and cities. Through her research and teaching, Henriette strives to inspire more self-reflective, diverse, equitable, and compassionate spatial practices for designing cities and landscapes. Her research investigates how shifting historical structures – morals, ethics, politics and cultural practices – shaped and continue to shape the buildings, cities, landscapes and cultural imaginaries we have inherited from the 19^th and 20^th centuries’ Western industrial culture. Understanding this history and heritage is key if we want to respond to the big challenges of the 21^st century – such as climate change, population growth, inequality, pandemics etc. – without repeating mistakes made by our predecessors, and to stimulate more just, equitable and sustainable spatial practices for the future. To this end, Henriette contributes to the building of institutional structures that allow interdisciplinary research to flourish, and she develops inclusive research and teaching environments that take into account the often-invisible economies of care and collaboration.

Henriette's research is widely published in international books and journals. Recent books include Tower to Tower (with Kristin Veel, MIT Press, 2020), Touch in the Time of Corona (with Kristin Veel, De Gruyter, 2021), and Untold Stories – Women Gender and Architecture in Denmark (with Jannie Bendsen and Svava Riesto, Strandberg Publishing, 2023). Her work has been recognised with a Senior Scholar Fellowship awarded by the American Society for Architectural Historians and she is a recent recipient of the Carlsberg Foundation Monograph Fellowship.

Together with Kristin Veel, Henriette coordinates Intersect, an academic community for interdisciplinary collaboration at the intersection of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and design which organises talks, seminnars and outreach activities including a podcast. 

Together with Sava Riesto, she also recently co-led Women in Danish Architecture 1925–1975, a research project which ran from 2020-2025 and which aims to provide a more just and complete understanding of architecture history by highlighting women’s contributions to the architectural disciplines in Denmark. You can read more about the project and its different outputs on the research project website.

Henriette takes an active leadership role at the University of Copenhagen where she currently serves as Head of Section and is an elected member of the PhD Committee of the Faculty of Science. Previous roles include work as co-founder of the Diversity Committee at the Department of Geoscience and Natural Resource Management, PhD Coordinator at the Section for Landscape Architecture and Planning, and as Head of Studies on the BSc/MSc of Landscape Architecture during the first coronavirus lockdown.

Undervisnings- og vejledningsområder

Current course responsibility on the BSc course Landskabsarkitekturens historie, nutid og fremtid.