Professor, department of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University
Ralph Ghoche is a nineteenth-century architectural historian and Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on French colonialism in Algeria. One area of his work examines the Catholic Church’s influential role following Algeria’s conquest in 1830, challenging secular narratives of Western modernization by analyzing how the Church reshaped Algiers’ urban space through the construction, conversion, and removal of buildings. This study explores the Church’s collaboration with architects, engineers, and colonial administrators to transform the city into a French and Christian space, aiming to revive Augustinian Christendom in North Africa. Another current area of study centers on the exploitation of Algeria’s mineral resources, particularly through the revival of ancient Roman quarries of marble, porphyry, and onyx.
Ghoche has also written extensively on French architecture and its relationship to theories of ornament, archeology, and aesthetics in the 19th century. His writings have appeared in Architectural Histories, JAE, Harvard Design Magazine, and in such edited volumes as Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Architecture, De l’orient à la mathématique de l’ornement, and Le siècle de Henri Labrouste. He recently co-edited a journal issue on the impact of environmental activism on urban and landscape development in Les cahiers de la recherche architecturale urbaine et paysagère. He is also a member of the journal’s editorial board. Ghoche is a co-chair of the Columbia University Seminar, “Beyond France,” and a co-lead on the project “Seeds of Diaspora,” funded by the Center for the Study of Social Difference.