Nicole Starosielski “The Cold Internet” [response: Devin Fore] Tuesday, October 5, 2021 @5pm ET Online Event [register here]
This presentation draws from Nicole Starosielski’s forthcoming book,Media Hot and Cold, a feminist and queer rewriting of media theory in the context of digital systems and climate change. It tracks the shifting thermal regimes that structure modern media, from print to digital infrastructures. While media have always been shaped by temperature, computational media systematically re-embeds network production, distribution, and access into both a colonial geography and into the hands of hyperscale media companies. Starosielski calls for a critical temperature studies that can address the connections between thermal contexts and media technologies.
All virtual events are open to the public and hosted via Zoom. Advance registration is encouraged. If you have further questions or need assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out to mandm@princeton.edu
{image credit: Ed Atkins, film-still, “The Worm” (2021) [courtesy of the artist] // background: Martin Kozlowski, “IMG_3418” (2021) [courtesy of the artist]}
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY GRADUATE PROGRAM IN MEDIA+MODERNITY
presents
Ed Atkins “The Worm” [response: Hal Foster] Tuesday, September 21, 2021 @5pm ET Film Screening / Online Event [register here] Ed will present his most recent video—The Worm (2021)—followed by a discussion with Hal Foster about the work and the artist’s practice at large.
Ed Atkins is an artist and writer who lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. An exhibition of new works—Get Life / Love’s Work—was recently mounted at the New Museum in New York, and a book—Drawings for Children—was published by König Books in July.
Hal Foster is Townsend Martin, Class of 1917, Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University.
Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen “The Nordic Pavilion in Venice: An Intra-Canonical Outlook” [interlocutor: Adrian Forty] Tuesday, April 6, 2021 @5pm Online Event [register here or stream here]
Sverre Fehn’s Nordic Pavilion in Venice is a masterpiece of postwar architecture. The young Norwegian architect won the competition for its design in 1958 and the building was inaugurated in 1962. Through six decades, the beloved structure has been mired in phenomenology, poetry, and the personal memory of the select. Looking at the archives, a very different story emerges. In minute detail, this book presents the history of the origins and making of the Nordic Pavilion; spanning from the geopolitical context in an increasingly tense Cold War atmosphere, to the aggregates in the concrete of the audacious roof construction, to the iconic trees, many of which had already died before the second exhibition in 1964.
Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives documents the extensive cast involved in the making of the Nordic Pavilion, spanning from kings, prime ministers, bureaucrats, ambassadors, museum directors, architects, and a myriad of artists’ associations, to Venetian dignitaries, engineers, gardeners, lawyers, and plumbers. The pavilion was conceived and built against the backdrop of friendships and animosities, power play and diplomacy. The detours and disappointments, the successes and failures of the Venice affair make a prism in miniature to understand the mindset and conflicting ambitions of the Nordic countries in the 1950s and 1960s. Richly illustrated with previously unpublished images, among them many photographs taken by Fehn himself, the archival evidence also sheds new light on one of the great Nordic architects of the recent past.
Mari Lending is Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Erik Fenstad Langdalen is Professor of Preservation at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.
Adrian Forty is Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and the author of Concrete and Culture, a Material History (2012). He is writing a book on disappointment.
Elisa Silva “Pure Space: Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Spontaneous Settlements” [interlocutor: George Baird] Tuesday, March 9, 2021 @5pm Online Event [register here or stream here]
City making in the Global South has been notoriously characterized for its simultaneous, although differing modes of operation: a formally planned and legal one that meets the needs and buying power of the wealthier part of the population, and an unplanned, illegal one, caused by the unmet demand of the remaining part. As a result, self-built homes and spontaneous settlements have emerged, and represent a large portion of the built environment, albeit a very compromised and unequal one.
For several decades, cities in Latin America have made significant investments to reverse this trend. However, improvement efforts alone have not been enough to lift the negative stigma from these territories. Recognition of barrios, villas, and favelas as parts of the city is a task still pending.
In a critical review of upgrading interventions, the presence of public space emerges as a key transformative element. Pure Space: Expanding the public sphere through public space transformations in Latin American spontaneous settlements is not intended to serve only as a catalogue, guide, or manual on how to produce public space in spontaneous settlements. Rather, it goes beyond the aims of an index of best practices. It is intended, instead, as an empirical base for a critical and theoretical engagement with the problematic of development, social inclusion, public investment, (in)formal settlement, civil society, and the public sphere. The publication argues to expand the agency of architects and urban designers and creatively find ways of justifying, financing, and building public spaces in communities – spaces that have a catalytic effectiveness in achieving significant urban and social transformation.
Elisa Silva is principal and founder of Enlace Arquitectura and Enlace Foundation, established in Caracas, Venezuela. The two entities work in tandem to advance the integration of cities including informal settlements through participatory design processes and cultural programs. Their work has received awards in numerous design competitions and international architecture and urban design biennials. The San Juan María Vianney Church in Media Legua, Venezuela was awarded in the XI BIAU 2019 and the project Integration Process Caracas in the barrio La Palomera is part of the XVII Venice Architecture Biennial 2021. Elisa received the Rome Prize from the American Academy in 2005, the Wheelwright Fellowship from Harvard in 2011, Graham Foundation Grant 2017, the Lucas Artist Fellowship 2019 and grants from the US, Swiss and French Embassies in Venezuela. She is co-author of CABA: Cartography of the Caracas barrios (2014) and Pure Space: Expanding the Public Sphere through Public Space Transformations in Latin American Informal Settlements (Actar, 2020). Elisa is Visiting Assistant Professor at Princeton University School of Architecture, Sessional Lecturer at the Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design at the University of Toronto, Associate Professor at FIU, and past Design Critic at the GSD and the Simón Bolívar University in Caracas, Venezuela. Elisa grew up between St. Louis and Venezuela.
George Baird is Emeritus Professor and former dean of the John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto, and founding principal of Baird Sampson Neuert Architects in Toronto. His publications include (with Charles Jencks) Meaning in Architecture (1969), Alvar Aalto (1969), The Space of Appearance (1995), Public Space; Cultural/Political Theory; Street Photography (2011), and Writings on Architecture and the City (2015). A collection of essays and interviews devoted to his work The Architect and the Public, edited by Roberto Damiani, was published in 2020. Baird has received the Gold Medal of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada (2010) and the Topaz Medallion of the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (2012). In 2016, he was invested in the Order of Canada.
Larry D. Busbea “Pattern Watchers: Environmental Response c. 1970” [interlocutor: Victoria Bugge Øye] Tuesday, March 2, 2021 @5pm EST Online Event [register here or stream here]
Before a new class of designers could begin to conceive of “responsive environments” as particular types of technical and aesthetic objects, new models of environmental response were necessary. These coalesced in the 1960s and 70s in many different disciplines, but always with the understanding that environment was becoming visible in ways it hadn’t previously; and that, by becoming perceptible it was becoming designable. However, the promised accessibility of environment never seemed to materialize, and would-be observers and designers were consigned to a compulsive search for the traces, imprints, and after-images of environmental interaction, i.e. patterns.
This presentation will bring together some of the key approaches and insights of the book The Responsive Environment: Design, Aesthetics & The Human in the 1970s. The work of Serge Boutourline, Jr. will be given as an example of the attempt to confirm the presence of a conditioning environment, and to optimize and redesign its elusive patterns.
Victoria Bugge Øye is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. Her field of research includes American and European architecture post-1945 and its intersections with discourses of science, medicine and psychology. Her dissertation, “Mind-Body Architecture: Coop Himmelblau and the Making of Environmental Health, 1967-77,” examines how new welfare state policies and emerging concerns about the environment in the late 1960s helped forge interdisciplinary collaborations between architecture and medicine to establish the field of environmental health in Austria.
Antoni Muntadas “The Construction of Fear” [interlocutor: Mary Anne Staniszewski] Tuesday, February 23, 2021 @5pm EST Online Event [register here or stream here]
Wooden fences, barbed wire, bars, walls, cameras, alarms, closed circuit TV, radars, dogs, security guards, electronic systems … are some of the devices which act within new private and public spaces supposedly for their security, surveillance and protection. Security and Surveillance is one of the fastest-growing industries and, in the end, is a subsidiary of the military industry. On a par with the design of jails, it is at the top of the list of major development projects in the construction industry. The configuration of cities has been defined and developed with urbanisation projects that expand the centre and create peripheries. At the same time, these peripheries create paradoxes between the public and the private, between the richest and the poorest. Suburb, a word from Latin origins and an Anglo-Saxon concept, is translated in a differential way depending on the context. It poses security as a reality and paranoia, and transforms gated communities into new bastions where the security and surveillance industry encounters an appropriate terrain for its development.
Access to the following video works has been kindly provided by the artist, Antoni Muntadas, for advance viewing:
Antoni Muntadas was born in Barcelona in 1942 and has lived in New York since 1971. He arrived at MIT in 1977 to join the Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) as a research fellow. There Muntadas explored topics such as the media landscape and the dichotomies between subjectivity and objectivity, and private and public on the media sphere. He works on projects in different media such as photography, video, publications, the world wide web, public interventions, and multi-media installations. Since 1995, Muntadas has grouped together a set of works and projects titled On Translation Series. More recently, he has developed other projects and series such as About Academia, Asian Protocols, Strategies of Displacement, and The Construction of Fear. Their contents and materials are highly diverse while they all focus on the author’s personal investigative experience and a particular project methodology that is applied to analyze diverse contexts and social aspects. Muntadas was Professor of the Practice at ACT in the Department of Architecture at MIT and at the IUAV Instituto Universitario de Arquitectura del Veneto in Venice. He has shown his work at Documenta (1977, 1997), at the Whitney Biennial of American Art (1991), at the 51ª Biennale di Venezia (2005), and other biennials such as São Paulo, Lyon, Taipei, Gwangju, Istanbul and La Habana. Muntadas’ work Political AdvertisementX 1952-2020, done in collaboration with Marshall Reese, is being shown now on the program democracies? at MOMA Magazine.
Mary Anne Staniszewski is an art and cultural historian whose books include a “trilogy” dealing with modernity and culture: Believing Is Seeing: Creating the Culture of Art (Penguin, 1995); The Power of Display: A History of Exhibition Installations at the Museum of Modern Art ( (MIT Press, 1998); and a third volume she is completing that is an interdisciplinary and intersectional investigation of race. Staniszewski has overseen a number of projects related to the New York City cultural center, Exit Art, which closed in June 2012, including a 2011 Contemporary Slavery Symposium and, as co-editor with Lauren Rosati, Alternative Histories: New York Art Spaces, 1960-2010 (Exit Art and MIT Press, 2012). She contributed the historical essay for SInce 1986: Swiss Institute, All Over the Map, eds., Simone Castets and Karen Marta (Scheidegger and Spiess, 2019). Staniszewski is an associate professor in the Department of the Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
Albena Yaneva “Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy” [interlocutor: Mark Wigley] Tuesday, February 16, 2020 @5pm Online Event [register here or stream here]
During the 1990s a flurry of concurrent developments in the social sciences and the arts brought archives to the fore of scholarly limelight: the “archival fever” in the arts and philosophy (Derrida, 1996), the emergence of the trend of “archival ethnography” in anthropology (Sahlins, 1992) and the “empirical turn” in archival science (The American Archivist, 1996: 59/2). The radical change in architectural practice triggered by computerization also led to its own “archival turn,” prompting practitioners to reflect on the techniques of archivization, both traditional and novel. All these developments point toward the importance to study archives as practice, and prompt us to ask: What constitutes an archive in architecture today? What epistemology does it perform? What kind of craft is archiving and how does it relate to design?
Addressing these questions, the lecture offers insights to the ontological granularity of architectural archiving based on interviews with archivist Chiara Porcu and architect Álvaro Siza in Porto and ethnographic observation of the practices of conservators, cataloguers, digital and paper archivists, museum technicians and curators at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. Following archiving in its mundane, down-to-earth and practical course – how objects are processed and catalogued, how drawings are preserved, how born-digital material battles time and technology obsolescence – allow us to unravel its multiple epistemic dimensions as well as to question some well-established myths of creativity and authorship.
Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory and director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG) at the University of Manchester, UK. She has been Visiting Professor at Princeton School of Architecture (2013), Parsons, New School (2015) and Politecnico di Turino (2018), and held the prestigious Lise Meitner Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden (2017-2019). Her research is intrinsically transdisciplinary and crosses the boundaries of science studies, cognitive anthropology, architectural theory and political philosophy. She is the author of several books: TheMaking of a Building (Peter Lang 2009), Made by the OMA: An Ethnography of Design (010 Publishers 2009), Mapping Controversies in Architecture (Routledge 2012), Five Ways to Make Architecture Political. An Introduction to the Politics of Design Practice (Bloomsbury 2017), Crafting History: Archiving and the Quest for Architectural Legacy(Cornell University Press 2020) and The New Architecture of Science: Learning from Graphene (World Scientific Publishing 2020), co-authored with Sir Kostya S. Novoselov (Nobel Laureate in Physics). Her work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Thai, Polish, Turkish and Japanese. Yaneva is the recipient of the RIBA President’s award for outstanding university-based research (2010).
Martino Stierli “Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity, and the Representation of Space” Interlocutor: Brigid Doherty Monday, November 9, 2020 @5pm Online Event [register here or stream here]
Montage is omnipresent in modern culture and discourse. Rooted in industrial production and popular image practices in the nineteenth century, and achieving its recognizable form in the avant-garde movements of the 1920s, the juxtaposition of (photographic) elements became, through adaption and analogy, a primary compositional principle in all artistic media. A direct consequence and function fo what Walter Benjamin termed “the age of technological reproducibility,” montage addresses the mode of perception specific to the mechanized metropolis. Engaging history and theory of architecture, photography, film, literature, historiography, and popular visual culture since the late nineteenth century, Montage and the Metropolis reassesses the category of montage as not only a dominant modernist compositional principle but also a way to think about embodied moving through space more generally—a key strategy for the production of meaning, adopted by multiple constituencies.
Martino Stierli is The Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern art (MoMA), a role he assumed in March 2015. Stierli oversees the wide-ranging program of special exhibitions, installations, and acquisitions of the Department of Architecture and Design. He is the author of Montage and the Metropolis: Architecture, Modernity and the Representation of Space (Yale University Press, 2018) and Las Vegas in the Rearview Mirror: The City in Theory, Photography, and Film (Getty Research Institute, 2013). He has organized and co-curated exhibitions on a variety of topics, including the international traveling exhibition Las Vegas Studio: Images from the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and The Architecture of Hedonism: Three Villas in the Island of Capri, which was included in the 14th Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2014. At MoMA; he has curated, with Vladimir Kulic, the exhibition “Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948-1980,” and, with Ann Temkin, “From the Collection: 1960-1969”. Together with the other chief curators, he was also responsible for the reconceptualization of the collection installations in the new and expanded MoMA, which opened to the public in October 2019. He is currently working on a large exhibition on the architecture of South Asia in the post-independence period.
Ruha Benjamin “Race to the Future? Reimagining the Default Settings of Technology & Society” Interlocutor: V. Mitch McEwen Thursday, November 5, 2020 @5pm EST Online Event [register here or stream here]
From everyday apps to complex algorithms, technology has the potential to hide, speed, and deepen discrimination, while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to racist practices of a previous era. In this talk, Ruha Benjamin explores a range of discriminatory designs that encode inequity — what she terms the “New Jim Code.” This presentation takes us into the world of biased bots, altruistic algorithms, and their many entanglements, and provides conceptual tools to decode tech promises with historical and sociological insight. She will also consider how race itself is a kind of tool designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice and discuss how technology is and can be used toward liberatory ends. In doing so, Benjamin challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold, but also the ones we manufacture ourselves.
Ruha Benjamin is Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, Founding Director of the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab, and author of the award-winning book Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code. For more info visit www.ruhabenjamin.com
V. Mitch McEwen is Assistant Professor in Architecture and Director of the Black Box research group at Princeton University.
Lydia Kallipoliti “The Curious Case of Closed Worlds” Interlocutor: Sylvia Lavin Monday, October 19, 2020 @5pm EST Online Event [register here or stream here]
This talk will explore a genealogy of contained microcosms with the ambition to replicate the earth in its totality; a series of living experiments that forge a synthetic naturalism, where the laws of nature and metabolism are displaced from the domain of wilderness to the domain of cities and buildings. Beyond technical concerns, closed worlds distill architectural concerns related to habitation: first, an integrated structure where humans, their physiology of ingestion and excretion, become combustion devices, tied to the system with umbilical cords; second, closed worlds are giant stomachs; they are inhabitable machines that digest resources and are sometimes disobedient; at times they digest, while at other times they vomit.
Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology, and environmental politics. She is an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York. She has also taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she directed the Master of Science Program, at Syracuse University, Columbia University [GSAPP], and Pratt Institute; she was also a visiting fellow at the University of Queensland and a visiting professor at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. She is the author of the awarded book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018) and Head Co-Curator of the upcoming Tallinn Architecture Biennale in 2022.
Sylvia Lavin is Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University.
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