The biennial Dissertation Colloquium brings together a select group of doctoral students from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds working on dissertation topics related to the history, theory, and criticism of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape. 

The Buell Conference on the History of Architecture brings together scholars in architectural and urban history to discuss topics in architecture, urbanism, and modernity as broadly understood.

Buell Dissertation Colloquium

The biennial Dissertation Colloquium brings together a select group of doctoral students from diverse institutional and disciplinary backgrounds working on dissertation topics related to the history, theory, and criticism of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape. 

Saturday, May 12, 2001

501 Schermerhorn Hall

A presentation of papers by doctoral candidates from international graduate schools based on dissertation research in areas related to American architecture, landscape, and urbanism, with scholarly commentary and discussion.

9:15 - 9:30 Introduction
Convener: Dell Upton, UC Berkley

9:30 - 11:15 Institution-Building
Tania Martin, UC Berkley, "Canonical Disruptions: The Roles Nuns Played in Developing an Architecture of Catholic Charity"
Dale Allen Gyure, University of Virginia, "The Improved School Machine": Efficiency, Education, and Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century School of Gary, Indiana"
Angel David Nieves, Cornell University, "To Erect Above the Ruined Auction Block... Institutions of Learning": African American Architects, Race, Women, and the Artifacts of Nation Making in the Post-Reconstruction South"
Response: Gwendolyn Wright, Columbia University

11:15 - 2:00 Popular Culture and Counterculture
Barbara Penner, London Consortium, "The Desired Charm of Privacy: Bridal Chambersin Mid-Nineteenth-Century America"
Nick Yablon, University of Chicago, "The "Met Life" in Ruins: Architectural Obsolescence, Popular Fiction, and the City of the Future (Anterior), 1909-1919"
Caroline Maniaque, Université de Paris 8, "Hard and Soft America: A French Perspective"
Response: Nigel Whiteley, Lancaster University

2:00 - 4:15 Modern Architecture: Anesthetics, Ideology, Reception
Joanna Merwood, Princeton University, "The Mechanization of Cladding: The Reliance Building ad Narratives of Modern Architecture"
Benjamin Flowers, University of Minnesota, "The Intentions of Most Advance Architects Imply a Social Revolution": Exhibition 15 and the New Masses"
Noah Chasin, City University of New York, "Louis Kahn's Ethical Brutalism"
Joseph Heathcott, Indiana University, "Four Vast Projects: Modernism, Public Housing, and the Visual Culture of Planning in St. Louis, 1940-1960"
Response: Kevin Harrington, Illinois Institute of Technology

4:15 - 5:30 Phenomenology and the Critique of Functionalism
Jorge Otero-Pailos, MIT, "American Roots: Norberg-Schultz's Late Formulations of Genius Loci as Aletheic Image"
Anthony Rayneford, University of Chicago, "Inventing Architectural Subjects: Functionalism, Imageability, and the Rhetoric of Experience in American Urbanism of the 1960's"
Response: Michael Hays, Harvard University

Concluding Discussion: 5:30 
Followed by a reception.