April 1, 2019
This spring, the Buell Center launches POWER online. POWER challenges participants to think about how infrastructure relates to life across a series of intersecting concerns, including democratic governance and climate justice.
From border walls to oil pipelines to microchips, technical infrastructures govern life in myriad ways. Objects of intense political, social, and economic contestation, these systems distribute power in both senses of the word: as energy and as force. Concentrating on the United States but extending internationally, this website brings together a multimedia collection of essays, events, initiatives, and resources, offering overlapping windows onto how “America” is constructed infrastructurally to exclude neighbors and to divide citizens. But infrastructures can also connect. Organized in a modular fashion as an open-access resource for learning, teaching, and acting, the website’s contents enable visitors to better understand the complex webs of power shaping our lives and the lives of others. Change begins with connecting the dots.
The Buell Center invites you to visit the site, to make connections with and between the project’s research and its growing network of contributors, and to reach out if you have suggestions. Online and off, the Buell Center is currently in the process of directing POWER toward urgent reflection on the cultural, political, historical, and technical contours of the proposal known as the “Green New Deal.” Stay tuned.
POWER is an initiative of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, which was founded in 1982. Its mission is to advance the interdisciplinary study of American architecture, urbanism, and landscape. A separately endowed entity within the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, it sponsors research projects, workshops, public programs, publications, and awards.
