Critical Essays on Architecture
We’re delighted to devote our April issue to the winning essays of our inaugural Avery Review Essay Prize! We received over 200 submissions from six continents; each attested to the remarkable research and writing being undertaken at schools of architecture, and each reinforced how vital the critical essay remains for helping us consider architecture’s effects in the world.
First Prize went to Tizziana Baldenebro (School of the Art Institute of Chicago, M.Arch). In “Chicago Works?,” Baldenebro dissects the cultural gravity of the recent Amanda Williams show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, confronting the undervaluation of critical black female art and the museum’s inclusionary curatorial practices.
Second Prizes went to Elsa Hoover (Columbia University, BA in Architecture), Kahira Ngige (Harvard GSD, MA in Urban Planning), and Sajdeep Soomal (University of Toronto, MA in History). In “The Temporary Logics of Extraction,” Hoover investigates the violent intersection of resource extraction, land ownership, and tribal sovereignty, focusing particularly on the architectural typology of the “man camp.” In “A More Perfect Vision,” Ngige speculates on the megachurch and the urban implications of ecclesiastical architecture in Nairobi. And in “Migrancy in the Garage,” Soomal situates family history within the colonial orders of Ontario and the Punjab.
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City will be camped out in the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern for Offprint London, from May 18 to 20. Stop by to see our newest publications alongside some old favorites.
The book fair will be open
May 18, 6-10pm
May 19, 12-8pm
and May 20, 12-6pm
Two new books from CBAC are launching all over the world this spring! Check them out wherever you are…
Unhoused: Adorno and the Problem of Dwelling by Matt Waggoner
April 27, Bradley Street Bicycle Co-op, New Haven, CT, 6pm
April 30, Book Culture, New York, NY, 7pm
The Empire Remains Shop by Cooking Sections
April 12, SVA MA Curatorial Practice, New York, NY 7pm
April 13, e-flux, New York, NY, 7pm
April 24, ArkDes, Stockholm, 6pm
May 14, The Showroom, London, 6.30pm
May 16, SALT Beyoğlu, Istanbul
June 11, University of the West Indies, Barbados, 5pm
June 22, Lafayette Anticipations, Paris
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Projects currently underway include:
A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change (by Marco Ferrari, Elisa Pasqual, and Andrea Bagnato) uses Italy’s melting northern border as a case study to chart the effects of climate change on geopolitical agreements and the cartographic methods used to represent them.
A House Is Not Just a House is the second volume in GSAPP’s “Transcripts on Housing” series, publishing Tatiana Bilbao’s recent lecture on lessons from designing housing in Mexico and how they can be applied abroad.
Signal. Image. Architecture. (by John May) aims to clarify the status of computational images in contemporary architectural thought and practice by showing what happens if the technical basis of architecture is examined very closely, if its technical terms and concepts are taken very seriously.
A stack of new books has just arrived at CBAC!
Add Architecture is All Over edited by Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter, Wright’s Writings: Reflections on Politics and Culture 1994–1959 with essays by Kenneth Frampton, Trace Elements by Aranda\Lasch and Blue Dunes: Climate Change by design edited by Jesse Keenan and Claire Weisz to your summer reading list!
CBAC will be spending some time at the Center for Architecture this March, with presentations related to recent book projects.
On Tuesday, March 7, Amale Andraos will be presenting The Arab City: Architecture and Representation. And toward the end of the month, join Michael Maltzan, author of Social Transparency: Projects on Housing, will be discussing some of his housing projects on Wednesday, March 29.
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Join us to discuss and preview Columbia in Manhattanville, a new book from Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. Amale Andraos, Reinhold Martin, and Eric Washington will be in conversation with Caitlin Blanchfield at 1pm on Nov 4, Ware Lounge, Avery Hall.
Home to the famed Cotton Club, Alexander Hamilton’s grange, the Manhattan Project, and a Studebaker factory, West Harlem has been an ever-transforming pocket of New York City. With the arrival of Columbia University’s Manhattanville expansion, it is now also a site of experimentation in the future of the twenty-first century university. Bringing together conversations with the architects and planners designing the Manhattanville campus, the educators who will inhabit its buildings, and essays from urban and architectural historians, this book documents the making of Manhattanville and critically engages the University’s own history of expansion.
The editors of five fresh publishing projects gathered at GSAPP on February 12, 2016, for a rousing conversation on the varying concerns, approaches, and stakes of contemporary architectural publications practice. Joining us were Anthony Acciavatti of Manifest; Shumi Bose and Jack Self of The Real Review; Alfie Koetter of Project; Jimenez Lai of the Treatise series; and Lily Wong of :.
A complete recording of the event is available here.
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“I first became aware of Amaza Lee Meredith two or three years ago. I had no idea that there had been a black woman architect practicing in Virginia as early as the 1920s and ’30s. And to be a modernist within that context! I thought that was quite extraordinary...”
Mario Gooden speaks with Artforum about his recently-released Dark Space—which the magazine describes as “a subtle reading of a number of African American cultural institutions [and] a consideration of the politics they spatialize”—in an interview from December 2015.