Aleksandr Bierig studies the history of architecture and infrastructure, with a focus on intersections between the built environment, the natural environment, and political economy in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain and the Anglo-settler world.

His current book project, Surplus Energies: Coal and the Production of Space in Britain, 1700–1850, considers the architecture, infrastructure, and culture of early coal use. It examines a range of sites and scales—from household fireplaces and infrastructural connections to monumental constructions—linked to the London Coal Exchange, the world's first market for fossil fuel. Focusing on a pivotal period when Britain stood apart as the planet’s primary fossil-fueled society, the book retraces how coal's energy unsettled and even overturned previous ways of building and thinking. Other recent and ongoing research includes an essay on the conflict between architecture and infrastructure at the early railway station, an edited volume (with Lucia Allais) on architecture and ideas of natural abundance in the nineteenth century, and episodes in the long history of mechanical building systems.

Bierig received his PhD from Harvard University and MArch from Princeton University. His work has been supported by the Institute for Advanced Study, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and the Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts at the University of Chicago, among other grants and fellowships. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Art History, Architectural Histories, Perspecta, Architectural Theory Review, Journal18, Manifest, and Log, as well as a number of edited volumes. He is an editor of the journal Grey Room.