Marija Marić, “Architecture and The Real-Estate-Media Complex”

Marija Marić‘s research focuses on the production of built environment and urban imaginaries in the context of global capitalism and digital media. From tracing the shifting boundaries of expertise between architects and real estate media strategists, to reading real estate language as an alternative construction site for the making of buildings and cities, to unpacking the role of blockchain technologies and the newly emerging Metaverse in allowing for new modes of land and real estate speculation, her work is organised around the question—what are the relationships between architecture and its property regimes, buildings and their real estate fictions, the physical and the digital, and how are architects and urban planners to mediate these materialities critically?

Marija Marić is an architect and researcher, working as a postdoctoral research associate at the Master in Architecture Programme, University of Luxembourg. In 2020, she completed her doctoral studies from the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), at ETH Zurich. Her dissertation, titled Real Estate Fiction. Branding Industries and the Construction of Global Urban Imaginaries examined the role of real estate communication strategists in the mediation, design, and globalisation of large-scale urban projects. Marija has been appointed as a co-curator of the Luxembourg Pavilion at the 2023 Architecture Biennale in Venice with the project that critically unpacks practices and promises of space mining through the perspective of resources. Her research on architecture, property, real estate, and media has been presented and published internationally, while her first book, titled Real Estate Poetry, is being scheduled for publication in 2023.