Jan Frohburg teaches architectural design at undergraduate and graduate levels and lectures on the history and theory of twentieth-century modern architecture in the School of Architecture and Product Design at the University of Limerick. A graduate of the Bauhaus University Weimar, he studied, practiced and taught architecture in Germany, Great Britain, Switzerland, Ireland and the United States.
He completed creative projects with The Drawing Board and in collaboration with Irish printmaker David Lilburn. He contributes regularly to the All-Ireland Architecture Research Group and continues to explore the past and present of modern architecture in Ireland. His research interests include community-centred planning and self-build projects, design education, and the spatial expressions of modernity, focusing on concepts characteristic to the work of Mies van der Rohe. Pursuing his interest in design education, Jan completed a Specialist Diploma course in Teaching, Learning and Scholarship in UL. His doctoral thesis focuses on Mies van der Rohe’s Concert Hall collage of 1942 and the conditions that enabled its production at a turning point in the architect’s career. He has presented and published nationally and internationally.
Recent publications include “The City Inside: Mies’s Photomontages of Interior Spaces” (Mies van der Rohe: The Architecture of the City, 2022), “Das ‘andere’ Haus Farnsworth” (Mies Episoden, 2021), “‘Mrs. Méric Callery’” (Routledge Companion to Women in Art and Architecture, 2021), “Regarding Mies’ courtyard houses” (Architecture Research Quarterly, 2015), “The presence of art in Mies van der Rohe’s houses” (Kunst og Kultur, 2014), “Ellington under Glass – ‘Integral Ball Proves Versatility of Crown Hall’” (Boletín Académico, 2019), “‘Fail Better’ – The potential of assessment in education for reflective practice” (Revista de Cultura Arquitectonica, 2013) and “Ideas of Freedom and Nature in the Work of Mies van der Rohe” (The Cultural Role of Architecture, 2012).