Flammable Building

December 5, 2024, 12 pm EST
300S Buell Hall and online

Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern)
Matthew C. Hunter (McGill)
A response by Aleksandr Bierig (UToronto)

During a period in the 18th and 19th Centuries when American architecture was essentially flammable, the economic imaginary of the United States was reinvented around the material value of timber and of insurance. In these talks, Daniel Immerwahr and Matthew C. Hunter connect architecture to abundance by describing: the rewards and risks of clear-cutting, quick construction, and town-burning that defined colonial building’s attitude to North America’s Indigenous forests, and the risk cartography that made insurance underwriting possible, with its surprising ties to the valuation of art.

For in-person attendance (general public welcome), please RSVP here. If you do not have an active Columbia ID card, please RSVP by December 3. If you do not have an active Columbia ID card, please RSVP by December 3. You will receive an email from Columbia University Public Safety containing a QR code, which you will be asked to present along with a matching ID, at campus gates (116th St and Broadway or Amsterdam Ave). Please allow a few extra minutes to pass through campus security.

For virtual attendance, register for the webinar here. 

Speakers

Daniel Immerwahr is Bergen Evans Professor in the Humanities and Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence at Northwestern University, where he teaches U.S. and global history in the History Department. He is also a contributing writer at The New Yorker. His first book, Thinking Small, offers a critical account of the United States' pursuit of grassroots development at home and abroad in the middle of the twentieth century. His second, the bestselling How to Hide an Empire, is a narrative history of the United States with its overseas territory included in the story. Immerwahr is now writing a fire history of the United States.

Matthew C. Hunter teaches in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University in Montreal. He is author of Painting with Fire: Sir Joshua Reynolds, Photography and the Temporally Evolving Chemical Object (2020) and Wicked Intelligence: Visual Art and the Science of Experiment in Restoration London (2013), both published by University of Chicago Press. He has recently co-edited “Art and the Actuarial Imagination,” a special issue of Oxford Art Journal. He is an editor of Grey Room.

Aleksandr Bierig is Assistant Professor at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto. He studies eighteenth- and nineteenth-century urban and architectural history, with a focus on interactions between the built environment, the natural environment, and political economy in Britain and its empire. He is currently working on a book that examines the architecture, infrastructure, and culture of coal use in Britain between 1700 and 1849. He is also a contributing researcher for the Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas project at the Buell Center.