Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter

Sean Anderson will discuss the topic of the refuge crisis and his recent exhibition Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter. Exploring the ways in which contemporary architecture and design have addressed notions of shelter in light of global refugee emergencies, the 2016-17 exhibit focused on conditions that disrupted conventional images of the built environment.

Sean Anderson is Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at The Museum of Modern Art. A Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, he has degrees in architectural design and architectural history from Cornell University, an M.Arch from Princeton University and a Ph.D in art history from the University of California, Los Angeles. He has practiced as an architect and taught in Afghanistan, Australia, India, Italy, Morocco, Sri Lanka, and the U.A.E. His book, Modern Architecture and its Representation in Colonial Eritrea, was published in 2015 and was nominated for the AIFC Bridge Book Award for Non-Fiction. At MoMA, he has organized the exhibition Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter (2016) and Thinking Machines: Art and Design in the Computer Age, 1959–1989.

This discussion is organized by David Eugin Moon for the seminar Speculative City: Crisis, Uncertainty, and Projections in Architecture.