Spring program
e-flux Architecture is proud to announce the launch of e-flux Architecture Lectures, a new monthly event series to discuss timely issues in contemporary architecture, theory, culture, and technology. e-flux Architecture Lectures aims to bring together both leading architectural historians and theorists as well as emerging researchers and practitioners to test out and experiment with new or ongoing research. Unthemed, the series simultaneously strives to generate new scholarship while surveying the cutting edge of architectural discourse. Our spring program includes lectures by Sylvia Lavin, Lucia Allais, Felicity D. Scott, Keller Easterling, and Billy Fleming.
Sylvia Lavin, “Generator’s Vital Infrastructure”
April 18, 2023, 7pm
RSVP
Cedric Price’s Generator is an important marker in an as of yet incomplete environmental history of the field. The project’s investigations into automated systems of growth and change and the particular forms of creativity proper to the knowledge worker in the information era led to its designation as the first intelligent building, but they also belong to a specifically American political ecology and economy in which occluded resources from southern states reappeared as cultural works of abstract value in northern metropolitan centers.
Sylvia Lavin is Professor of Architecture at Princeton University and was Chairperson of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA.
Lucia Allais, “The Protective Matrix: Sandbags, Monuments, and Law in the Twentieth Century”
Thursday, May 4, 2023, 7pm
RSVP
A remarkable protective architecture was invented over the course of the twentieth century: the international practice of covering monumental structures with lattices of sandbags. The lecture traces the evolving legal and technical justifications that were given for these structures, including in debates about the “humanization of war” at the League of Nations, ultimately proposing to detect a distinct spectrum of aesthetic ideologies behind this protective matrix.
Lucia Allais is Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, the Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, and an editor of the journal Grey Room.
Felicity D. Scott, “An Eye Half Open Only to Architecture”
Saturday, May 27, 2023, 7pm
RSVP
Wolfgang Tillmans’ Book for Architects was first realized at the invitation of Rem Koolhaas for the 2014 International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. This talk will revisit the work not only in the context of the Venice biennale and subsequent iterations, but as a lens through which to read the artist’s multi-faceted engagement with architecture’s disciplinary mandates, its media-technical vehicles, and its entanglements with neoliberalism and market forces.
Felicity D. Scott is a scholar based in New York, where she teaches at Columbia University.
Keller Easterling, “Trust Land”
Tuesday, June 6, 2023, 7pm
In the wake of civil rights struggles, a rural area in Southwest Georgia became a global stage for rehearsing some of the world’s most provocative experiments with community and land tenure. Reflecting solidarity between the civil rights, Pan-African, Nonaligned, and Tricontinental movements, associations with prominent international activists also linked this area to decolonizing efforts in the Global South just prior to a neoliberal turn, and modeled approaches to survival that are now broadly relevant to today’s social and climate justice work.
Keller Easterling is a writer, designer, and the Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale.
Billy Fleming, “Fire, Ice, and Ore: Arctic Elements, Indigenous Resistance, and the Global Energy Transition”
Thursday, June 22, 7pm
The technologies at the core of the energy transition—solar photovoltaics, wind turbines, battery farms, data centers, and advanced nuclear power—all depend on a planetary supply matrix of rare earth elements and critical minerals. This lecture will situate Greenland within the global energy transition and implicate its future in that of the Global North, and ask what it means for resource communities like Narsaq, Greenland for the US and other imperial powers to pursue the kind of resource-intensive energy transition that is now underway.
Billy Fleming is the founding Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, co-founder of the Climate + Community Project, and co-creator of the organization Data Refuge.
