THE LIBRARY IS OPEN 27

The Library is Open 28 welcomes Ignacio Galán for a conversation on his latest book, Architecture’s Kinships.

Architecture shapes and embodies complex social and environmental articulations. It is not the container and representation of pre-packaged relationships, but a medium for motley associations. In advancing this proposition, this book explores diverse alliances and permeations of knowledge across media, bringing together arguments and projects that result from multiple conversations and collaborations. It contains an invitation to work in critical, even if messy, coalitions with the hope of questioning exclusionary forms of affiliation and contributing to the imagination of alternative platforms of relationality through the exploration, discussion, activation, and transformation of the built environment.

With texts and projects by Emanuel Admassu, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Architensions (Alessandro Orsini + Nick Roseboro), Neeraj Bhatia / THE OPEN WORKSHOP, Matilde Cassani, Future Projects (Khoi Nguyen + Julie Tran), Ignacio G. Galán, David Gissen, Kevin Gotkin, Andrés Jaque, Karen Kubey, Jesse McCormick, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Iván L. Munuera, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, O-F Architects (Alvaro M. Fidalgo + Arantza Ozaeta), Marina Otero Verzier, Joel Sanders, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Hashim Sarkis.

Ignacio G. Galán is an architect, historian, and educator. His work is concerned with the way in which architecture mediates power, participates in the articulation of societies, and is entangled in processes of inclusion and exclusion—attending to questions of residence, belonging, citizenship, and kinship. These interests manifest in design projects as much as in diverse scholarly and curatorial endeavors concerning nationalism, colonialism, migration, and disability cultures. His work operates across media and is continuously informed by different collaborations.

His first scholarly monograph, titled Furnishing Fascism, has been published by the University of Minnesota Press (2025). His research has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Design History, the Journal of Architecture Education, modernism/modernity, Journal of Architecture and ARQ among other academic journals and edited volumes. He has presented his work at the Center for Architecture AIA in New York in 2022, in the international selection of the Venice Biennale in 2014 and 2021, and at the Lisbon Triennale 2013. He is a co-editor of the edited volumes Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022) and After Belonging (Lars Muller, 2016) and was the co-curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016.

As a designer, the projects of his office [igg-office for architecture] bring to the fore questions of belonging, diversity, and access. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Center and has been awarded in several competitions. The office has recently designed and built a number of residential projects that engage diverse forms of kinship, hospitality, and care.

He teaches at the Department of Architecture at Barnard+Columbia Colleges since 2016, and in 2024 he received the Tow Award for Innovative and Outstanding Pedagogy. Galán has also taught studios and seminars at Columbia GSAPP and PennDesign. Galán studied Architecture at ETSAMadrid and TUDelft, he graduated with Distinction from the MArchII program at Harvard GSD, and has a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from Princeton. He has been a pre-doctoral Fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Scholar, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Research Fellow at the CCA.

The Library is Open is a lunchtime series featuring recently published works and their authors, curated by Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP.