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.

A Seminar with Georges Teyssot

 

Image: Anonymous, "Futuristic representation of the video-telephone in the year 2000," French engraving, ca. 1900, Private Collection.

 

This public seminar introduced concerns about the rise and fall of privacy, and the concept of the “in-between,” to the topic of the gaze. Moreover, one might ask how the notions of window, door, frame, and screen have unfolded in time, and how, under new guises, they contribute to the emergence of a virtual terrain or digital topographies. As such, the relation between intimate and “extimate” is of a quasi topological nature, a situation in which the interior is turned into an exterior, like a Möbius strip, a closed, non-orientable surface with only one side and only one boundary.

 

Georges Teyssot is Professor at Laval University’s School of Architecture in Quebec City (QC, CA). He has previously taught history and theory at the IUAV of Venice (Italy), at Princeton University’s School of Architecture (NJ, USA), and at the GTA in the Department of Architecture at Zurich’s ETH. He has written the introduction to the volume of Diller + Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (Princeton Architectural Press, 1995, 2011). He was the curator with Diller + Scofidio of The American Lawn at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in 1998. He is the author of many books, including Die Krankheit des Domizils (Vieweg+Teubner Verlag, 1989), The History of Garden Design (Thames and Hudson, 1991, 2000), The American Lawn(Princeton Archtiectural Press, 1999) A Topology of Everyday Constellations, in the “Writing Architecture Series”, (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2013), and Walter Benjamin: Les maisons oniriques, (Hermann, 2013).