Liane Lefaivre, a Canadian and an Austrian, is o-Professor (Professor Ordinaria, that is with a chair and tenure) of Architectural History and Theory at the University of Applied Art in Vienna Austria, now retired.
Her writing and research relates to two formative modern periods: first, from the Renaissance to the end of the Enlightenment, and second from the late nineteenth century to the present.
She coined, with Alexander Tzonis, her partner in work and in life since 1972, the concept of Critical Regionalism, inspired by the wide-ranging aesthetic, historical, political and environmentalist writings of Lewis Mumford and they have published widely on the topic of critical regionalism as a global phenomenon, in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Greek, German, Chinese and Japanese.
In 2002 she curated the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam under Rudi Fuchs based on her original research into Aldo van Eyck's playgrounds, edited the exhibition catalogue Aldo Van Eyck, The Playgrounds and the City (Summer 2002).
She is a member of the board of The Journal of Architecture (Royal Society of Architects, London), and she has been on the boards of Design Book Review (Berkeley), and Archithèse (Zurich) and Architecture (New York), Architect’s Newspaper (New York) Cahiers de la Recherche (French Ministry of Culture, Paris).