Print Publications & Architectural History

The Buell Conference on the History of Architecture: In Print Sponsored by The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture

16-17 April 2010

This inaugural Buell Conference on the History of Architecture considers emerging directions in scholarly publishing on architecture and related fields within the North American academy. Conceived bibliographically, the conference brings together recent authors on diverse subjects to present new, unpublished work to be discussed in relation to their books and those of their colleagues. Its subject matter encompasses architecture, urbanism, and modernity broadly understood.

Today, publication remains central to maintaining those overlapping spheres in which discourse forms, circulates, is reproduced, and is contested. By inquiring into different modes of history writing, the conference explores interactions between architectural scholarship, interdisciplinary exchange, and shifting discursive contours.

In particular, the conference asks: What kinds of intellectual constellations, if any, are forming in the new scholarship? What are their primary concerns, their premises, and their debates? What role(s) do books play in these formations? At a time when academic publishing is under increased pressure, the conference also affirms the contributions made by such work to defining the parameters of academic inquiry more broadly, and of architecture and urbanism more
specifically.


Conference Schedule

Friday 16 April 2010

2:00-2:15
Welcome and introductory remarks
Reinhold Martin, Director
Buell Center, Columbia University

2:15-4:15
Books and Buildings: Obsolescence and Sustainability
Daniel M. Abramson, Tufts University

Space, Information, and the Public Sphere
Richard Wittman, University of California, Santa Barbara

Respondent: Ed Eigen, Princeton University


4:30-6:15
Desprez’s Linneanum: Classification, Hybridization and the Question of Architectural Order
Erika Naginski, Harvard University

Experiencing Architecture and Embodying Citizenship in the Early Republic
David Serlin, University of California, San Diego

Respondent: Can Bilsel, University of San Diego


Saturday 17 April 2010

9:15-11:00
Birds of a Feather
Hadas Steiner, University of Buffalo

Arcosanti vs. Onecity
Larry Busbea, University of Arizona

Respondent: Mary Louise Lobsinger, University of Toronto


11:15-1:00
Building Virtual Cities: 1895-1945
Jennifer S. Light, Northwestern University

What Is a House?
Jonathan Massey, Syracuse University

Respondent: David Smiley, Barnard College


2:00-3:45
Modern Architecture, Colonialism and Race in Fascist Italy
Brian L. McLaren, University of Washington

Inventing Early Modern Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, Parsons The New School for Design

Respondent: Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan


3:45-5:30
Beyond the Quotidian: Narratives of Modern Architecture and Everyday
Life in France
Tom McDonough, Binghamton University

Habitations: On Bodily Habit and Architecture
Aron Vinegar, The Ohio State University

Respondent: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Columbia University

All events take place in Wood Auditorium, Avery Hall, Columbia University

The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
www.buellcenter.org