Dr. Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher who studied architecture in Vienna, Paris, and London. She worked with Herzog & de Meuron and Raumlabor Berlin, and completed her PhD through the Horizon 2020 project TACK—Communities of Tacit Knowledge. Her dissertation on multisensory perception in extended reality (xR) won the 2023/24 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Prize.
In 2025, Paula joined Gramazio Kohler Research as part of a two-year ETH Postdoctoral Fellowship to develop an immersive xR installation, Mirrorworlds / Imagine: A Space of Us All. This speculative prototype investigates AI models of future domesticity, where rooms unfold not through text or image prompts, but through the inhabitants’ proximity to one another—merging and overlapping thoughts, imaginations, and dreams with their external environments to create an allegorical architecture of desire.
Paula’s xR models have been nominated twice for the Dutch Film Award Gouden Calf and exhibited internationally at the Royal Academy of Arts London, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, MAK Vienna, Museum der Moderne Salzburg, and Ars Electronica Linz. As part of her research into female pioneers of virtual technologies, she founded the educational platform www.xr-atlas.org and has lectured at institutions such as The Bartlett UCL, Architectural Association London, Angewandte Vienna, Academy van Bouwkunst Amsterdam, and UdK Berlin. In 2025, she served as Acting Professor at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. |