Research
At global dis:connect, Clemens is exploring how architecture, infrastructures and environmental media shape planetary imaginaries and knowledges at the thresholds of globalisation. His project Planetary analogues: global dis:connectivity through terrestrial simulations of extraterrestrial environments examines how architectural and environmental test sites model planetary conditions through hybrid infrastructures of experimentation. From Antarctic research stations and simulations in the Atacama Desert to underwater habitats and lunar prototypes, these sites are hyper-connected yet deliberately isolated laboratories that render the extraplanetary experimentally knowable. Developed under conditions of controlled dis:connectivity, planetary analogues translate global networks of science, technology and governance into insulated proxy worlds where the limits of habitability are rehearsed and redesigned. By tracing their emergence from Cold War geopolitics to the architectures of the New Space Age, Clemens is asking how such sites reframe globalisation’s Earth-bound logics to envision futures on — and beyond — the planet.
Have a look at Clemens’s research poster about his project.
Biography
Clemens is a historian and theorist of built environments, exploring how architecture, infrastructures and media have shaped planetary knowledges and imaginaries since the 19th century. He is research coordinator of the laboratories of dis:connectivity at the Käte Hamburger Research Centre global dis:connect, where he is developing the multi-sited research program Planetary analogues. He is also a fellow (Das Junge ZIF) at the Center for Interdisciplinary Research (ZiF: Zentrum für interdisziplinäre Forschung) at Bielefeld University (2025-2029) and an affiliated fellow at the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University Giessen.
His Ph.D. is in the History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University, and he holds graduate certificates in the History of Science and Media + Modernity. As a Fulbright scholar at Harvard University, Clemens earned an M.Des. in the History and Philosophy of Design, graduating with a commendation for outstanding achievement. His scholarship has been recognised through various fellowships at the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Free University of Berlin, and the Center for Advanced Studies ‘Imaginaria of Force’ at the University of Hamburg. Numerous grants from the History of Science Society, the Andlinger Center for Energy and Environment and the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities have supported Clemens’s work. More information can be found at clemensfinkelstein.com.
Selected Publications
Books (peer-reviewed)
forthcoming Our Planetary Condition: Foundations for a Politics with the Earth. [with Frederic Hanusch, Liza B. Bauer, and Claus Leggewie]. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Journal Articles (peer-reviewed)
forthcoming ‘Planetary Palimpsest: A Pithy History of Earthly Vibrations and Architectural Recorders’. Thresholds 54.
2022 ‘Das Planetarische Politisch(e) Denken’, PVS – Politische Vierteljahresschrift 63, no. 4: 703-728. [with Frederic Hanusch, Liza B. Bauer, Claus Leggewie, Dipesh Chakrabarty, et al.]
2022 ‘Crafting Interiority, or the Evolutionary Objectivity of Vibrating Worlds’, react/review 2: 26-56.
Chapters in Edited Volumes (peer-reviewed)
forthcoming ‘Vibration’. In Wörterbuch ästhetischer Kraftbegriffe, ed. Frank Fehrenbach. Berlin: De Gruyter.
2025 ‘Planetary Disequilibrium’. In Sick Architecture, ed. Beatriz Colomina, 276-283. Cambridge, USA: MIT Press.
2025 ‘Colonial Waves from Apia to Yap: Technoscientific Network Architectures of German Expansionism in Oceania’. In Architecture in Oceania (1840-1970): Para-Colonial Influences – Colonial Transactions – Postcolonial Legacies, ed. Michael Falser, 163-194. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
2025 ‘The Vibration Sense: Pallaesthesia, Sensory Substitution Design, and the Reformation of a Sixth Sense in the Early Twentieth Century’. In The Routledge History of the Seneses, eds. Andrew Kettler and William Tullett, 165-189. New York: Routledge.
2024 ‘Vibration als Phänomenotechnik in den Umweltkonzeptionen der Moderne’. In Wahrnehmungskräfte – Kräfte wahrnehmen, eds. Frank Fehrenbach, Laura Isengard, Gerd Micheluzzi and Cornelia Zumbusch, 391-420. Berlin: De Gruyter.
2023 ‘Seismischer Kolonialismus, Architektur und die Triangulierung der Welt. Das Geophysikalische Samoa-Observatorium in Apia (1902-1914)’. In Deutsch-koloniale Baukulturen: Eine globale Architekturgeschichte, ed. Michael Falser, 58-61. Passau: Klinger.
2022 ‘Vibe, c. 1969: The Technicity of Operative Ambience in Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios’. In The Sound of Architecture: Acoustic Atmospheres in Place, eds. Angeliki Sioli and Elisavet Kiourtsoglou, 71-86. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
2021 ‘Towards a Transsensorial Technology of Abstraction (Ekstraktion)’. In The Iconology of Abstraction: Non-Figurative Images and the Modern World, ed. Krešimir Purgar, 193-207. New York: Routledge.
Interviews (given)
2023 ‘The Unheard Symphony of the Planet’, Madeleine Morley, The New York Times (February 19): 15.
Click here for Clemens’s CV, including a full list of publications.