Dr Sofia Nivarti is an architect and architectural historian. She is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge.
Dr Nivarti’s specialism is Aalto scholarship—the critical analysis of the architecture, urbanism, design and thought of Finnish modernists Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto and their associates. Her first monograph “The Religious Architecture of Alvar, Aino and Elissa Aalto” was published by Lund Humphries in 2023.
Her other research interests lie in the histories and theories of modern architecture, Indigenous architectures, architectural criticism, and architectural pedagogies for children. She is currently engaged in two main research projects, one on the post-construction ‘afterlives’ of Aalto designs, and the other on contested notions of contemporaneity in Sámi public buildings.
Informing and informed by her academic research, Nivarti is also actively engaged in curating architecture. Major exhibitions include “Città dei Morti—City of the Dead” at the Alvar Aalto Museum (2015) and “Alvar Aalto in Deutschland: Gezeichnete Moderne/Alvar Aalto in Germany: Drawing Modernism” at the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin (2023). She also served as academic advisor and presenter for the feature-length documentary film “AALTO” (dir. Virpi Suutari, 2020).”