Dr. Nikos Magouliotis

Dr. Nikos Magouliotis is an architectural historian whose work focuses on architecture and building culture in Ottoman Greece and central Europe, with a particular focus on the vernacular both as a historiographic construct and as a historical reality. He teaches a course titled “Vernacular: Architecture’s Persistent Other”, which examines how non-authored and non-academically informed building cultures have diachronically served as a theoretical foil and mirror for elite architecture practice and discourse.

Nikos is project coordinator for the SNF project Swiss Rococo Cultures: Idioms of ornament and the architecture of East Switzerland (2025-2028), and is also part of the SNF project Building Identity: Character in Architectural Debate and Design (2022-2026). In the former project, he researches the vernacular architecture and material culture of Appenzell and Toggenburg, and how rural buildings absorbed and transformed Rococo ornament. In the latter, he looks at the literary myth of the chalet as constructed by Rousseau and others, in juxtaposition with the precarious lives, magical beliefs and apotropaic practices of the peasants who inhabited such houses in the 18th century.