Conversations on Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas
Design by Morcos Key
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.
February 29, 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)
February 3, 2023, 12pm | A conversation between Brenna Bhandar (University of British Columbia) and Mabel Wilson (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)
November 16, 2023, 6pm CST (7pm EST), Logan Center, University of Chicago
As discussions of “returning” lands to the dispossessed become more widespread, questions arise about whether land can ever be considered, managed, or inhabited as a “gift.” What cultural and architectural practices arise when land is valued outside of market capital? Ana Maria León and Łukasz Stanek report from contemporary architectural examples in Ghana and Chile.
Speakers:
Łukasz Stanek is Professor of Architectural History at A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. Stanek authored Henri Lefebvre on Space: Architecture, Urban Research, and the Production of Theory (2011) and Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe,
West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (2020), which won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion by the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, among others. Stanek taught at the ETH Zurich (Switzerland), the University of Manchester (UK), and held guest professorships at Harvard University (USA) and the University of Ghana (Ghana).
Ana María León is an architect, a teacher, and a historian of texts, images, objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her work studies how spatial practices shape the modernity and coloniality of the Americas. León is co-founder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including Nuestro Norte es el Sur and the Settler Colonial City Project. She has co-organized several workshops exploring architectural history’s relationship to intersectional feminism, the global, the South, decolonization, and antiracism, and is instigator and co-editor of the SPACE/RACE, SPACE/GENDER, SPACE/BODY, and SPACE/LABOR crowdsourced reading lists. León is author of Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires and A Ruin in Reverse / Bones of the Nation. León is Associate Professor at the Harvard GSD, her current projects examine spatial tactics against the Chilean dictatorship and the intersection of modern architecture and Indigenous groups in the Americas.
Jacobé Huet is Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago. As a historian of modern architecture in the transcultural Mediterranean, Huet is particularly interested in the circulation of forms and ideas, intersections between modernism and vernacular, and depictions of architecture in art and literature. Huet is completing the manuscript for her first book, a reciprocal history of the white cube as a vernacular-modernist motif in the colonial and postcolonial Mediterranean.