Anthony Fontenot is an architectural historian, theorist, and curator. His work examines the relationship between modern design, architecture, ecology, and the built environment. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Louisiana, a Master of Architecture degree from Southern California Institute of Architecture, and a Ph.D. in the history and theory of architecture from Princeton University. In 2008 he was a visiting fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture. In academic years 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, he was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Scholars fellowship at Princeton, and in 2010-2011, he held a research fellowship at the Getty Research Institute. In 2018 and 2021, he was a recipient of the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund awarded by the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University. Fontenot is the author of Non-Design: Architecture, Liberalism, and the Market (University of Chicago Press, 2022), Notes from Another Los Angeles: Gregory Ain and the Construction of a Social Landscape (MIT Press, 2022), Philipp Oswalt and Anthony Fontenot, Berlin. City Without Form: Strategies for a Different Architecture (DOM publishers, 2021) and Carol M. Reese, Michael Sorkin, Anthony Fontenot, New Orleans Under Reconstruction: The Crisis of Planning (Verso, 2014).

Most recently, Fontenot has authored several chapters, including “Activating Medellín and the Politics of Citizen Engagement” in All-Inclusive Engagement in Architecture, eds., Farhana Ferdous and Bryan Bell (Routledge, 2020), “The Battle over Bauhaus Design: Hannes Meyer versus László Moholy-Nagy” in Hannes Meyer’s New Bauhaus Pedagogy: From Dessau to Mexico, ed., Philipp Oswalt (Spector Books, 2021). Fontenot has published articles in numerous international journals including Domus, Volume, Places, Space, Parametro, and The Nation. His work has been exhibited internationally at the Venice Biennale, Documenta, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Canadian Center for Architecture, MAK Center, and A+D Museum. Fontenot has organized numerous international symposia and exhibitions. He was a co-curator of the exhibitions “Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X – 197X” (2007-), 2011 Gwangju Design Biennale in South Korea, and Pedro E. Guerrero: Photographs of Modern Life (2012). He curated Gregory Ain: Low-Cost Modern Housing and the Construction of a Social Landscape (2015) and Floating Cities (2019). He was the principal organizer of Exposing New Orleans, a conference, workshop, and exhibition at Princeton University in 2006. He organized Sustainable Dialogues (2007-2008), a series of international symposia on the reconstruction of New Orleans sponsored by the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the U.S. Department of State. He served as one of the organizers of the symposium Questioning the Standard: New Narratives of Art in Los Angeles (2011) at the Getty.

Fontenot is currently researching the work the Los Angeles-based African American architect James Homer Garrott (1897 – 1991), one of the few Black modernist architects in the United States, who was engaged with many of the important issues of the period including affordable housing and desegregation, yet his work remains largely unknown, even in Los Angeles.

Education

B.Arch-University of Louisiana
MArch-Southern California Institute of Architecture
PhD History and Theory of Architecture-Princeton University.