Avigail Sachs

Avigail Sachs teaches the history and theory of architecture and landscape and studies the design professions in the United States. She is especially interested in the relationship between design and research and the role of each in the formation of the design disciplines and professions. Her doctoral dissertation, completed at the University of California, Berkeley, focused on the history of research for architecture in American schools after World War II. Titled Research for Architecture, Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession, the study focused on different interpretations of the term research, and on the institutions created to support these efforts. An essay based on this study, “The Postwar Legacy of Architectural Research,” was awarded the 2009-2010 Journal of Architectural Education Best Scholarship of Design Article Award. A broader publication based on this work, the book Environmental Design: Architecture, Politics and Science in Postwar America, was recognized with an Award of Excellence by the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH) in 2019. Sachs is looking forward to implementing insights from these historical studies in today’s world as Interim Associate Dean for Research in the College of Architecture and Design.

Since moving to East Tennessee, Sachs has been fascinated by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and its comprehensive impact on the environment of the Valley and of Appalachia. She is currently completing a collaborative project with Micah Rutenberg titled The Mechanized Landscape: Statecraft and Environment in the Tennessee Valley Authority. This project combines maps, photographs and text to provide a visual study of how the TVA’s goals for a democratic society were implemented across a large region and how they instigated a fundamental change in the environment and in the lives of the people living in it. The book will be available in late 2025. The TVA is also the subject of her book The Garden in the Machine: Planning and Democracy in the Tennessee Valley Authority, which focused on the transformation of utopian ideals into professional practice in architecture, landscape architecture and regional planning.

Before training as an historian Sachs has practiced as an architect and taught architectural design. She completed a Bachelor of Architecture at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology, and was a project architect for the Sail Tower, a $50,000,000 project in Haifa, Israel. Concurrently she taught first year design studio at the Technion. In this teaching she drew on her Master of Science thesis, completed at MIT, which focused on “stuckenss” in the design studio – a predicament familiar to all those engaged in this exciting learning environment.