A symposium interrogating the relationship between architectural theory and politics by revisiting the past decades of architectural theory at the California College of the Arts. Featuring Jasmine Benyamin (USC), Irene Cheng (Cooper Union), Lisa Findley (CCA), David Gissen (Yale), Jia Yi Gu (Harvey Mudd), & Mabel O. Wilson (Columbia).
Albert Narath: Solar Adobe Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture
Esra Akcan: “Right to Heal: Climate Disaster and Colonial Comfort”
Michael Moynihan: “Indigenismos and National Identity”
Ignacio G. Galán: Furnishing Fascism: Modernist Design and Politics in Italy
Rick Rundell: “Perspectives on Technology and Architecture”
Image: Autodesk Technology Center Boston, courtesy of Autodesk, Inc.
Architectural theory has at times been taught as a strictly academic enterprise, one set in opposition to the material demands of architectural practice. This symposium, THEORY ACTS, posits instead that theory is a crucial instrument for developing an activist practice, and that the textual and discursive sides of architectural education are vital to becoming an engaged citizen (of the design disciplines and the world at large). At a moment of political intensity in the United States and globally, what are the possibilities of architectural theory in helping us reckon with our profession’s capacities and complicities?
Image: The Atelier Populaire workshop at the École des Beaux-Arts. Paris, May 1968. Photograph by Phillippe Vermès.
James Graham’s essay “A Bridle of Wires: Constructivism and the Nationalities Policy in the Early USSR” has been published in a special collection in Architectural Histories that brings together scholars working on Eastern European topics at a moment of geopolitical crisis.
Image: The ‘Steppe City’ of Elista, Russia, as illustrated in USSR in Construction, 1 (1930).
Irene Cheng and Neeraj Bhatia: "The Form of Politics/The Politics of Form"
Markus Miessen: "Agonistic Assemblies -- On the Spatial Politics of Horizontality"
Nerea Calvillo presents Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds
As part of the Spring 2023 HTX Lecture Series, Lydia Kallipoliti presents The Architecture of Closed Worlds.
As part of the Spring 2023 HTX Lecture Series, Elise Hunchuck, Marco Ferrari, & Jingru Cyan Cheng present Sky River and Other Atmospheres.
As part of the Spring 2023 HTX Lecture Series,Andrew Shanken presents The Everyday Life of Memorials.
As part of the Spring 2023 HTX Lecture Series, María González Pendás presents Concrete Bodies, Magic Shells, and the Labor Archives of American Coloniality.
As part of the Spring 2023 HTX Lecture Series, Nerea Calvillo presents Aeropolis.
As part of the Spring 2023 HTX Lecture Series, Mark Wasiuta presents Air Manifest.
As part of the Spring 2023 HTX Lecture Series, Enrique Gualberto Ramirez presents The Map and the Tennis Ball: Voyages in Aerostatic Flight.
Beth Rose Middleton Manning will present a lecture as part of the Fall 2022 HTX Lecture Series.
Maura Lucking will present a lecture as part of the Fall 2022 HTX Lecture Series.
James Graham’s chapter “Archiving Atmosphere” has been published in the Routledge Handbook of Art, Science, and Technology Studies, edited by Hannah Star Rogers, Megan K. Halpern, Dehlia Hannah, and Kathryn de Ridder-Vignone.
Image: Robert Morris, Trench with Chlorine Gas, 1970, from the series Five War Memorials. (c) 2020 The Estate of Robert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.
As part of the Spring 2022 HTX Lecture Series, Peter Christensen presents Architecture in Full Circle: From Mine to Scrapyard.
As part of the Spring 2022 HTX Lecture Series, Diana Martinez presents Sparkling Skin, Clean Hands: A Concrete Architecture for Decolonization.
As part of the Spring 2022 HTX Lecture Series, Jane Mah Hutton presents Arresting Decay: Tropical Hardwood Lives and Afterlives.
"Building Integration," an essay by Michael Abrahamson and James Graham on Gunnar Birkerts' work at the historically Black college of Tougaloo, has been published in Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press), edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister.
Images: Gunnar Birkerts, design for Tougaloo College, Jackson, Mississippi, 1965
As part of the Spring 2022 HTX Lecture Series, Andrew Alden presents a Walking Tour of Oakland Quarries and Building Stones.
Decommodifying Ownership, a cluster of courses proposed by James Graham, Janette Kim, and Brendon Levitt, has been awarded a course development prize by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University.
Image: Carlos Garcia and Yue Liu, project diagram for the Reframing Property studio taught by Janette Kim, fall 2021.
The Materialities of Architectural Discourse explores the new mediums and platforms through which architectural theory is happening today—particularly emerging ones that might call into question some of the ways that theory and discourse have familiarly been materialized.
Lecture by Shannon Mattern, Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research.
Rafico Ruiz and Desiree Valadares will present a lecture as part of the Spring 2021 HTX Lecture Series, which fall under the theme Spaces of Extraction.
