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Design: Levan Kiladze

The Encounters Series

What happens when you detach the study of American architecture (the Buell Center’s founding mission) from the inherited temporalities of United States national history, periodized, as it tends to be, by the fundamental rupture of the American Revolution? What phenomena help us think of the built environment in the Americas germinating across vaster territories and wider spans of time? One answer emerges from literature that shows architecture as a stage for and product of a long series of encounters. These moments, when radically different cultures and practices have regularly come into contact, sometimes violently, have always included the transmission of architectural knowledge. The Buell’s Encounters Series hosts speakers who tell stories, both historical and contemporary, that have shaped American built environments, in order to learn how building cultures, divisions of space, dwelling practices and other aspects of architectural discourse have been exchanged, incorporated, transformed, and retained during a long history of American encounters.