Design by Morcos Key
This year, the Buell Center is hosting a series of conversations among scholars, designers, and cultural producers whose work clarifies architecture's imbrications with land in the Americas. This plural, Americas, helps decenter the concept of "American Architecture" in two ways: by connecting building practices across the Western Hemisphere, and by recognizing that there are several Americas within the United States.
Not too long ago, "American Architecture" was an unambiguous formulation, but today there is clearly no such single cultural product. If "land" seems especially ripe for architectural rethinking, then, it is because it has given many permission to think about history in grand metaphorical terms: that America was built like a building, as one thing, in one place. Undoing this myth is no easy task, however. We will privilege stories and projects that reveal the highly technical ways these landed imaginaries continue to affect how the built environment is designed and inhabited.
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)
October 27, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Tatiana Bilbao (Tatiana Bilbao Estudio) and Michael Meredith (MOS Architects) with Gary Leggett (Leggett & Cahuas)
December 8, 2022, 12pm | A conversation between Zeynep Çelik Alexander (Columbia University) and Aleksandr Bierig (University of Chicago) with Jonathan Levy (University of Chicago)
February 3, 2023, 12pm | A conversation between Brenna Bhandar (University of British Columbia) and Mabel Wilson (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)
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)
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)