Discrepant Circulations

As questions of mobility become more prominent in architectural theory and history, it is time to rethink the terms that have shaped how the field conceptualizes movement. “Circulation” is more than a synonym for the spaces through which people and things pass; it locates tensions between movement and arrest, passage and capture, flow and containment. What the discipline of architecture calls circulation concerns more than ideals of fluid, elegant, or efficient mobility: it also names operations that organize, differentiate, and channel people and things by means of pathways and diversions, openings and closures. Over the last two decades, adjacent fields such as art history, anthropology, global history, and film and media studies have theorized circulation in a different manner, examining how the meaning of images, capital, knowledge, or commodities are transformed by their currency in global networks. These different theoretical traditions can be brought into productive dialogue to grasp points of complementarity and of friction.

The field might begin by unlearning the habit of treating circulation as a thing, as a discrete aspect of a building’s composition. Nor is it sufficient to consider circulation primarily as a metaphor borrowed from medical discourse beginning in the nineteenth century. Critical attention should be paid to what might be called “discrepant circulation,” those processes that differentiate mobilities by means of social, technical, and aesthetic practices, differences constituted within historically unequal relations of power and knowledge. Some of the questions this symposium hopes to address include: Through what processes have elements like doors, stairs, passages, gates, signals, or screens mediated and differentiated the mobility of humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans? How have conceptions of movement through buildings and cities been structured by formations of class, race, caste, ability, or gender? In what ways are such structuring formations and cultural techniques legible or illegible in the documents that architectural history investigates? How have concepts of circulation themselves been transformed by changing techniques for the opening and closing of boundaries? How have epistemological categories informed practices that set people, information, and things in motion, or conversely, those that bring them to a halt? How have architects sought to represent mobility and how, in turn, have these techniques shaped architectural thinking?

The symposium, organized by Craig Buckley, brings together a leading group of historians, architects, theorists, and curators to think together about the opportunities and hazards of this pervasive, yet under-examined, concept in the discipline. 

Speakers include: ​​​​​​​Ross Exo Adams (Bard College), Tim Anstey (Oslo School of Architecture), Aleksandr Bierig (University of Toronto), Craig Buckley (Yale University), Jordan H. Carver (Yale University) , Francesco Casetti (Yale University), Swati Chattopadhyay (University of California, Santa Barbara), David Gissen (Yale University), Samia Henni (McGill University), Francesca Hughes (Yale University), Diana Martinez (Tufts University), Morgan Ng (Yale University), Alena Beth Rieger (Oslo School of Architecture), Kishwar Rizvi (Yale University), David Sadighian (Yale University), and Mark Wasiuta (Columbia University).

Discrepant Circulations has been generously supported by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund at the Macmillan Center, the History of Art Department, and the School of Architecture. Symposia at the Yale School of Architecture are supported in part by the J. Irwin Miller Fund.

Please register online.