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.

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Design: Morcos Key


State Effects: A Public Conference
Friday, September 27, 2024
Fayerweather 209, Columbia GSAPP  

What is the relationship between the built environment and what we call "the state"? To reframe this question, this one-day conference draws from recent literature that has challenged the conception of the state as an autonomous monolith that exerts uniform power on the world around it. What does it mean to understand the state, instead, as an entity that gains its coherence from its effects? How can architecture, understood as a state effect, help re-conceptualize the state as a central conceit in modernity? 

For in-person attendance (general public welcome): Email [email protected] to RSVP. If you do not have an active Columbia ID card, please RSVP by September 25 with the following information: your full name as written on a government-issued ID and your preferred email address. 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


Program

9:30 am 
Introduction 
Lucia Allais & Zeynep Çelik Alexander

10 am - 1 pm  
Morning Session 
Cole Roskam (HKU), "The Extra-State Effect of the People's Palace, Kinshasa, Zaire, 1973-1979" 
Daniel Abramson (BU), "Federalism, Finance, and Fictions of Postwar American Government Architecture"
Sophie Cras (Paris 1), "Designing the Perfect Market"
Yara Saqfalhait (Columbia), "The Idealism and Realism of Saḳızlı Ōḥānnes: Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Late Ottoman Empire"
Response: Rosalind Morris (Columbia)

2 - 5 pm 
Afternoon Session
Sheila Crane (UVA), "Unmapping Land, Law, and Sovereignty in Casablanca"
Sonali Dhanpal (Columbia), "Housing Empire's Subjects: The Moral Panic Over Race in Post-War Britain"
Brodwyn Fischer (UChicago), "Informalization and the State in Urban Brazil"
Brian Larkin (Columbia), "The Political Economy of Light" 
Response: Bruno Carvalho (Harvard)

5 pm 
Reception
 

Speakers

Daniel M. Abramson is Professor of Architectural History at Boston University. He is the author of three books, including Obsolescence: An Architectural History, and co-editor of two Aggregate volumes, most recently Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century. Current work is on American government center’s architecture since 1900, in terms of federalism, capitalism, citizenship, and trust.

Bruno Carvalho is Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and Co-Chairs the Art, Film, & Culture Committee at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. He is the author of the award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro. Currently, he is writing a book tentatively called The Invention of the Future: A Transatlantic History of Urbanization (under contract with Princeton University Press)It focuses on the experiences and aspirations of city dwellers and planners, recasting modern urbanization within a history of competing visions for the future, from the 1750s onward. The book proposes that urban histories can renew our capacity to envision and pursue large-scale transformations. 

Sheila Crane is Associate Professor and Chair of Architectural History at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Mediterranean Crossroads: Marseille and Modern Architecture, which received the 2013 Spiro Kostof Award. Her current project is tentatively entitled The City in the Shadow of the Shantytown: A Critical History of the Bidonville, and supported by Dumbarton Oaks, Columbia’s Italian Academy, and the Clark Art Institute. Crane has published widely, including forthcoming essays in French StudiesBloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women Architects, and Wiley-Blackwell’s Companion to French Art.

Sophie Cras is Assistant Professor in Art History at Université Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her research explores the intersections between visual art and economics in the contemporary period. She is interested in the economics of art and its market, with an emphasis on the economic knowledge and practices of artists themselves. She also studies the way economists mobilize images, as well as the creative and critical view that artists provide of the economy of their time. She is the author of The Artist as Economist. Art and Capitalism in the 1960s and the editor of an anthology of artists’ writings about the economy since the 19th century. She recently completed a new book manuscript entitled The Capitalist Eye: From Commercial to Colonial Museums.

Sonali Dhanpal is the 2024-26 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University and a historian of modern architecture and urbanism who specializes in histories of colonialism, capitalism, and inequality. Her research on late colonial South Asia and post-colonial Britain examines the relationship between architecture and racial hierarchies that explain race, caste, and class-based unfreedoms within broader struggles for space under racial capitalism. Her first book, Caste, and the City analyses Bangalore’s emergence out of a boundary between colonial and princely rule to unravel the inextricable relationship between caste, the political economy of land/property, and the city. Dhanpal’s new research critically situates Britain’s post-war architect-planner-led construction boom and subsequent decline (1950-1980) as an afterlife of empire through a social and intellectual history of race and housing. Her scholarly work has been supported by the Royal Historical Society and Institute of Historical Research, School of Advanced Studies, University of London, the Paul Mellon Centre for British Art, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain. She received her PhD in Architectural History and Theory in 2023 from SAPL, Newcastle University, as the inaugural Forshaw Scholar and was the 2023-2024 Princeton-Mellon Fellow in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities at Princeton University.

Brodwyn Fischer (Ph.D. Harvard 1999) is Professor of History and Director of Global Studies at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching focus on the intersecting histories of cities, law, race, inequality, slavery and social movements in Brazil and Latin America. Her publications include articles and translations in English and Portuguese as well as A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth Century Rio de JaneiroCities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America (with Bryan McCann and Javier Auyero); The Boundaries of Freedom: Slavery, Abolition and the Making of Modern Brazil (With Keila Grinberg); and Informal Cities: Histories of Governance and Inequality in Latin Europe, Latin America, and Colonial North Africa (with Charlotte Vorms, forthcoming). She has won several national book and article awards, and her research has been funded by the Harvard-Radcliffe Institute, the ACLS, the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for Humanities, and the SSRC. She is currently writing a book called Intimate Inequalities that seeks to understand urban informality as an afterlife of slavery in Recife, Brazil.

Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria, examining the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. He explores how media technologies comprise broader networked infrastructures that shape a whole range of actions from forms of political rule, to new urban spaces, to religious and cultural life. He is currently completing the manuscript for Secular Machines: Media and the Materiality of Islamic Revival, which analyzes the role media play in the rise of new Islamic movements in Nigeria. Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria, and, with Lila Abu-Lughod and Faye Ginsburg, co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain.

Rosalind Morris is an anthropologist and cultural critic, and Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, where she has been appointed since obtaining her doctorate from the University of Chicago in 1994. Her current ethnographic research is focused in the gold mining regions of South Africa; she previously worked in mainland Southeast Asia, and especially Thailand. In both her theoretical writings on contemporary social and political issues, and in her ethnographic work, which is focused on problems of value and the remaking of life-worlds in the aftermath of de-industrialization, she is concerned with questions of mediation—conceived in both media-technical and socio-political terms. Morris’s writings span genres and disciplines, and included essays and monographs, poetry and libretti, as well as film scripts. Her most recent book is The Returns of Fetishism: Charles de Brosses and the Afterlives of an Idea

Cole Roskam is Professor of Architectural History in the Department of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. His research explores architecture's role in mediating moments of transnational interaction and exchange between China and other parts of the world. His articles and essays have appeared in Architectural HistoryArtforum InternationalGrey Room, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, among others. He is the author of two books, including Improvised City: Architecture and Governance in Shanghai, 1843-1937 (University of Washington Press, 2019) and Designing Reform: Architecture in the People's Republic of China, 1970-1992 (Yale University Press, 2021).

Yara Saqfalhait is a PhD candidate in architecture history at Columbia University’s GSAPP. She addresses the interconnected histories of architecture, political economy, state administration, and aesthetics with a focus on the late Ottoman empire and modern Middle East. She was trained in architectural engineering at Birzeit University in Palestine, and earned an MDes in history and philosophy of design from Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society and the Buell Center, and published in The Avery Review and Bidayat, among others.
 

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