Dietmar Offenhuber, 2019-20 Princeton Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism & the Environment

Dietmar Offenhuber’s scholarship focuses on the relationship between design, technology, and governance. His research project, Sensory Accountability – Materializing Pollution in New Jersey’s Industrial Centers investigates the material aspects of environmental data collection and their role in visual evidence construction. Exploring what he terms “sensory accountability,” Offenhuber studies the practices used to visualize the impacts of phenomena such as environmental pollution and climate change. Building on his award-winning book Waste is Information – Infrastructure Legibility and Governance (MIT Press, 2017), this project will critically revisit the concept of urban legibility in the contemporary city, and expand it to environmental, justice, and governance issues. 
 
Offenhuber holds a PhD in Urban Planning from MIT, a MS in Media Arts and Sciences from the MIT Media Lab, and a Dipl. Ing. in Architecture from the Technical University Vienna. During his fellowship at Princeton he will be on leave as Associate Professor at Northeastern University in the departments of Art + Design and Public Policy. 
 
Offenhuber’s fellowship is made possible through the support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the High Meadows Environmental Institute (HMEI), and the Metropolis Project of the School of Engineering and Applied Science at Princeton.