Rate My Professor Tamar Zinguer

Dr. Tamar Zinguer is an architect, architectural historian, and educator serving as Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma's Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, promoted in July 2024 after joining as Assistant Professor in August 2021. She heads the first-year architectural design curriculum, leading a team that teaches approximately 120 incoming students and fostering curiosity and invention through community-engaged seminars. Prior to OU, she was full-time Associate Professor at The Cooper Union School of Architecture in New York City for 16 years (2005-2021), with additional appointments including Visiting Associate Professor at Princeton University School of Architecture (Spring 2016), Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP (Spring 2004), Visiting Critic at Cornell University (2002-2003), and Instructor of Design at Technion Faculty of Architecture and Planning (1994-1998). Zinguer's academic background includes a Ph.D. and M.A. in History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University, an M.Sc. in Architecture from Technion Israel Institute of Technology, and a B.Arch. from The Cooper Union.

Zinguer's scholarship examines the pedagogy of design through history and across scales, from objects to landscapes, addressing construction and destruction. Her first book, Architecture in Play: Intimations of Modernism in Architectural Toys (University of Virginia Press, 2015), analyzes how toys reflected social, economic, and technological shifts while intimating modernism, earning the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title award from the American Library Association in 2017. Current projects are Sandbox: An Architectural History of Play, supported by the 2026 National Humanities Center Summer Residency for a chapter on 1960s New York playgrounds, and Architecture Degree Zero, aided by a Visiting Scholar Fellowship at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Key publications include "Model Desert, Sandbox Monument" (Journal of Architectural Education, Fall 2023), "Hands in Sand" (Are You a Model?, Jovis Verlag, 2024), "The Sandbox: How Women Planted Play in the City" (Material Culture, 2022), and "Bruno Zevi’s Architecture Degree Zero" in Bruno Zevi: History, Criticism and Architecture After World War II (Franco Angeli, 2021). Honors encompass OU Arts and Humanities Forum Public Fellowship (2022-2023), Excellence in Teaching Awards from OU Gibbs College and Division of Architecture (recent years), Princeton Barr-Ferree Foundation (2013), Smithsonian Lemelson Center (2002), and others. She has presented at SAH, ACSA, Technion, Harvard GSD, and CCA.