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.
This year, the Buell Center continues and concludes its series of “Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas” which began in Winter 2021. The theme of land, and the plural, Americas, is meant to help expand the Center’s mission in two ways: first, by situating US building practices comparatively in hemispheric relation with the rest of the continent; and second, by suggesting that there are several Americas within the United States. This Fall, we will host speakers who turn our attention to architecture’s role in the political economy of land.
In celebration of the Buell’s 40th Anniversary and its participation in the 5th Annual Chicago Architecture Biennial, events will be held in various locations throughout New York City and Chicago. All events will be held in person and on Zoom, as well as live-streamed to GSAPP’s YouTube channel here. Please email [email protected] to RSVP or register for the Zoom link on the event's page.
Thursday 29th February 2024, 12 pm | A conversation between Stella Nair (UCLA) and Caroline Murphy (MIT); Ateya Khorakiwala (Columbia GSAPP) will provide a response
November 16, 2023, 6pm CST/ 7pm EST| A conversation between Łukasz Stanek (University of Michigan), Ana María León (Harvard GSD), with Jacobé Huet (University of Chicago)
October 12, 2023, 12pm | A conversation between Deepa Ramaswamy (University of Houston) and Amiel Bizé (Cornell University), with Reinhold Martin (Columbia University)
October 20, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Vanessa Agard-Jones (Columbia University), Seth Denizen (Princeton University), and Linda F. Chavez Baca (JGMA), with Catherine Fennell (Columbia University)
December 8, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Zeynep Çelik Alexander (Columbia University) and Aleksandr Bierig (University of Chicago) with Jonathan Levy (University of Chicago)
October 27, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Tatiana Bilbao (Tatiana Bilbao Estudio) and Michael Meredith (MOS Architects) with Gary Leggett (Leggett & Cahuas)
April 7, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Stéphanie Barral (Sociologist at the French National Institute for Agronomic and Environmental Research) and Timothy Mitchell (William B. Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University)
March 24, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Benedict Clouette (Doctoral Student in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP) and Alma Steingart (Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Columbia University)
February 24, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Joseph Kunkel (Director, Sustainable Native Communities Design Lab at MASS Design Group) and Teresa Montoya (Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago)
The history of architecture has long addressed industrialization but too often forgotten coal itself: its ubiquity, its energetic spread, and its capacity to transform urban building culture. In this event, architectural historians Aleksandr Bierig (University of Chicago) and Zeynep Çelik Alexander (Columbia University) will present their current research on the architecture of coal in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century British Empire. Çelik Alexander’s work examines the Museum of Economic Geology. Opened in London in 1851, it acted as a kind of “proto-database,” instrumental in converting subterranean mineral deposits from a lottery to a “resource.” Returning to an earlier moment in this history, Bierig will offer a reading of two responses to urban coal use: late seventeenth-century essays by John Evelyn and Timothy Nourse. In their attention to the emergent, local interactions between coal, smoke, and the built environment in London, these authors revealed how fossil fuel threatened to transform the material basis of society in a new and encompassing way. Historian of capitalism Jonathan Levy (University of Chicago) will provide a response.
Aleksandr Bierig is a Harper-Schmidt Fellow and Collegiate Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. His research focuses on interactions between histories of the built environment, the natural environment, and political economy in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain. His current book project examines the architectural and infrastructural implications of the rise of coal use in London, addressing a range of sites and activities connected to the construction of the London Coal Exchange, the world's first market for fossil fuel.
Jonathan Levy is a historian of economic life and of the United States, with interests in the relationships among business history, political economy, legal history, and the history of ideas and culture. In addition to being a member of the University of Chicago’s Department of History and the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought he is the current Faculty Director of the Law, Letters, and Society program.