Architecture in Development

This book launch and discussion celebrates the release of Architecture in Development: Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022) from the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. A presentation by editors Ateya Khorakiwala, Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Columbia University; Ayala Levin, Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles; and Fabiola López-Durán, Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History at Rice University will be followed by a response from Debashree Mukherjee, Associate Professor in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies, and Paulo Tavares, architect, author, and educator; as well as a discussion with the audience.

Organized by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

Visit the Columbia GSAPP YouTube Channel to watch the live stream.

This event is open to the Columbia University community. The general public must register in advance and confirm COVID-19 vaccination status in compliance with current Columbia University health requirements using this online form.

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Ateya Khorakiwala is an assistant professor of architecture at Columbia University. She researches infrastructure, materiality, and aesthetics during India’s developmental decades. Her book-in-progress, Famine Landscapes, investigates the intersections between architecture, infrastructure, and hunger in India in the twentieth century.

Ayala Levin is an associate professor in the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Architecture and Development: Israeli Construction in Sub-Saharan Africa and the Settler Colonial Imagination (Duke University Press, 2022).

Fabiola López-Durán is an associate professor of art and architectural history at Rice University. She earned her PhD in history, theory and criticism of architecture from MIT. Adopting a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, López-Durán’s research and teaching interrogates the cross-pollination of ideas and mediums—science, politics, and aesthetics—that ignited the process of modernization on both sides of the Atlantic, with an emphasis on Latin America. López-Durán’s book, Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity, investigates a particular strain of eugenics that, at the turn of the twentieth century, moved from the realms of medicine and law to design, architecture, and urban planning—becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity. This book received a SAH/Mellon Author Award in 2018 and the Robert Motherwell Book Prize in 2019.

Debashree Mukherjee is a film and media scholar based in New York. Her book Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City (Sept 2020), does a deep dive into histories of filmmaking in late colonial India. Mukherjee teaches at Columbia University as an associate professor in the department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), edits the peer-reviewed journal BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies, and curates film exhibitions. Currently, she is working on several research projects, including a second book that is tentatively titled “Mediated Ocean: A Techno-Aesthetic History of Indentured Migration.”

Paulo Tavares is an architect, author, and educator. His practice dwells at the frontiers between architecture, visual cultures, and advocacy, opening a collaborative field aimed at environmental justice and counter-hegemony narratives in architecture and visual cultures. His work has been featured in various exhibitions and publications worldwide, including Harvard Design Magazine, The Architectural Review, Oslo Architecture Triennial, Istanbul Design Biennale, and São Paulo Art Biennial. He is the author of several books questioning the colonial legacies of modernity, most recently Des-Habitat (2019), Lucio Costa era Racista? (2022), and Derechos No-Humanos (2022). He leads the architecture agency autonoma in Brazil, was co-curator of the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, and is curating the Brazilian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennial.