Design: Marie Otsuka
Architecture and Abundance: Studies in the History of American Architecture
How has land’s endlessness been constructed? How has abundance been secured by design, and what architectural shadow is cast by its counterpart, scarcity? Over the last two years, the Buell Center has conducted research and hosted discussions interrogating the core assumption that land precedes architecture. This work focused on the ways building, infrastructure, surveying, and related disciplines make land available for ownership and exploitation in the Americas. Last spring, the Buell Center convened a two-day workshop to develop this thematic through a more specific historical cut—one that examines how land’s abundance as a natural commodity has been constructed through architectural means—towards the production of an edited volume with an introduction co-authored by Lucia Allais and Aleksandr Bierig. Scholars in this project work on building and landscape designs that helped circumscribe who was deemed worthy of the freedoms afforded by natural abundance and who was excluded from taking part in nature’s liberal gifts.
The 2024-2025 Abundance Talk series extends from the book project, providing a platform for a broader study of its themes. This season features a range of actors and geographies, from the 18th-century United States to global sites today.
Abundance Workshop: April 13, 2024
Participants: Ultan Byrne (Columbia), Jennifer Chuong (Harvard), John Davis (OSU), Lucia Galaretto (Columbia), Timothy Hyde (MIT), Alison Isenberg (Princeton History), Maura Lucking (Buell/ U Wisconsin-Madison), Diana Martinez (Tufts), Michaela Rife (SUNY Plattsburgh), Cecília Resende Santos (Columbia), David Sadighian (Yale), Desirée Valadares (UBC)
Abundance Talk #1: April 12, 2024
Presentations by Jennifer Chuong (Harvard), and Maura Lucking (UW-Milwaukee/Buell Fellow); Response by Daniel Abramson (Boston University)
From bespoke column capitals to sinuous settlement paths, the architectural means of settling the bounds of abundance in the 18th and 19th Centuries spanned from the detailed to the territorial. In the first of Buell’s Abundance Talks, Jennifer Chuong addressed Benjamin Latrobe’s “American Orders,” a veritable making-stone of agrarian abundance, and Maura Lucking revealed the pitched-roofed architecture of “Indian cottages” as a means of imperialism. Daniel Abramson responded.
