Archive Matrix Assembly: Nana Last and Thomas Struth

Nana Last MArch ’86 is an art and architecture theorist. She is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where she founded the interdisciplinary Ph.D. Program in the Constructed Environment. Her writing considers relations between architecture, art, philosophy and science in modern and contemporary society. Her books include: Wittgenstein’s House: Language, Space and Architecture (2008, 2012, Fordham University Press), and Archive Matrix Assembly: The Photography of Thomas Struth, (2021 Applied Research + Design). She is currently working on a book tentatively entitled: “From Text to Algorithm: Architecture and Big Data” that examines the epistemological impacts of the advent of big data on architecture, art and urbanism. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation for Advance Studies in the Fine Arts. She received a Ph.D. in Architecture and Art: History, Theory and Criticism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Master’s degree in Architecture from Harvard University.

Thomas Struth was born in 1954 in Geldern, Germany and studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. He was part of the first generation of artists to study photography with Bernd and Hilla Becher. Comprehensive solo exhibitions of Struth’s work have been presented at institutions including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, The Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, the Museum Folkwang in Essen and Haus der Kunst in Munich. Between 1993-1996 Struth was the first Professor for Photography at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe. Struth was awarded the Spectrum International Prize for Photography by Kulturstiftung Lower Saxony. He is Honorary Fellow of The Royal Photographic Society  and Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Struth’s work is featured in various public art collections, including Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Tate Gallery, London, the Galleria d’Accademia, Florence, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. The artist lives in Berlin.