GSAPP News
This round-up of publications from 2021 and 2022 showcases the latest research by GSAPP faculty members Erica Avrami, Luis E. Carranza, Patrice Derrington, Reinhold Martin, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Karla Rothstein, Mark Wigley, and Weiping Wu, as well as the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.
GSAPP FACULTY-AUTHORED PUBLICATIONS
Preservation, Sustainability, and Equity (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022)
Erica Avrami
The third volume in the Issues in Preservation Policy series, this book explores historic preservation as an enterprise of ideas, methods, institutions, and practices that must reorient toward a new horizon, one in which equity and sustainability become critical guideposts for policy evolution. The book features contributions from Lisa T. Alexander, Louise Bedsworth, Ken Bernstein, Robin Bronen, Sara C. Bronin, Shreya Ghoshal, Scott Goodwin, Claudia Guerra, Victoria Herrmann, James B. Lindberg, Randall Mason, Jennifer Minner, David Moore, Marcy Rockman, Stephanie Ryberg-Webster, A.R. Siders, Amanda L. Webb, and Vicki Weiner.
Erica Avrami is the James Marston Fitch Assistant Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP. Avrami is teaching the spring 2022 “Preservation and Sustainability” course and leading the Historic Preservation Studio II.
Read more on the Columbia University Press website.
Radical Functionalism: A Social Architecture for Mexico (Routledge, 2022)
Luis E. Carranza
This book focuses on functionalist architecture developed in Mexico during the 1930s, analyzing the texts and projects of its main advocates including Juan Legarreta, Juan O’Gorman, the Union of Socialist Architects, and Manuel Amábilis. The publisher states, “The book examines their engagement and negotiation with foreign influences, issues of gender and class, and the separation between art and architecture. Functionalist practices are presented as contradictory and experimental, as challenging the role of architecture in the transformation of society, and as intimately linked to art and local culture in the development of new forms of architecture for Mexico, including the “vernacularization” of functionalism itself.”
Luis E. Carranza is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP whose work primarily focuses on the relationship and codependence of social, literary, philosophical, and theoretical ideas within modern art and architecture in Latin America. During the spring 2022 semester, Carranza is teaching the course “(Un) Modern: Ex-Centric Latin@/X Spatial Practices” as part of the School’s History and Theory elective sequence.
Read more on the
Routledge website.
Built Up: An Historical Perspective on the Contemporary Principles and Practices of Real Estate Development (Routledge, 2021)
Patrice Derrington
This book provides an overview of the evolution of property development, synthesizing economic history and literature on planning and finance. From the publisher: “Built Up uncovers the roots of the global real estate industry in the machinations of a patron of Shakespeare, the merged lineages of business savvy women and men, startlingly innovative collaborations with the first English architect, and the radical explorations of other denizens of early modern London – and what those colorful origins mean for the practice of property development today.”
Patrice Derrington is Holliday Associate Professor Director, Real Estate Development Program at Columbia GSAPP and is currently teaching the spring 2022 course “Capstone: Development Case Studies” with Brian Loughlin and the joint architecture and real estate development studio “The Bridge” with Christoph Kumpusch.
Read more on the Routledge website.
Knowledge Worlds (Columbia University Press, 2021)
Reinhold Martin
This book explores what the practices, procedures and systems that have shaped higher education institutions in the U.S. can reveal about the production and distribution of knowledge. From the publisher, “Reinhold Martin argues that the material infrastructures of the modern university—the architecture of academic buildings, the configuration of seminar tables, the organization of campus plans—reveal the ways in which knowledge is created and reproduced in different kinds of institutions. He reconstructs changes in aesthetic strategies, pedagogical techniques, and political economy to show how the boundaries that govern higher education have shifted over the past two centuries.”
Reinhold Martin is a Professor of architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where he directs the History and Theory elective Sequence. His principal area of research has been the material, architectural history of knowledge infrastructures and institutions during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the United States, including their epistemological, social, and aesthetic aspects.
Read more on the Columbia University Press website.
Distributed Monuments (2021)
Jorge Otero-Pailos
Published on the occasion of Otero-Pailos’ “Distributed Monuments” exhibition at the New York-based gallery Sapar Contemporary, this book documents work composed of dust transferred from monuments onto latex casts and features a conversation between the artist and art historian Dr. Noam Milgrom Elcott. Sapar Contemporary states about the series, “[Otero-Pailos] employs the material residues of our modernity - including airborne atmospheric dust, waterways, traces of sweat and body sounds, maps, even embassy security fences, to render their invisible meanings visible.”
Jorge Otero Pailos is a Professor and Director of the M.S. and PhD programs in historic preservation at Columbia GSAPP. His work lies at the intersection of art, architecture and preservation. He is currently teaching the spring 2022 course Modern American Architecture and Historic Preservation Thesis.
Read more on the Artspace.
The Future of the Corpse: Changing Ecologies of Death and Disposition (Praeger, 2021)
Karla Rothstein, Christina Staudt
This book explores the past, present and future of end-of-life care, funerary services, human disposition methods, memorializing, and mourning. The publisher states, “The book culminates in a presentation of emerging sustainable disposition technologies and innovative designs for proposed public memorial projects that respond to shifting values, beliefs, and priorities among an increasingly diverse population.”
Karla Rothstein is an Adjunct Associate Professor at GSAPP, where she directs the Death Lab. She is currently teaching a spring 2022 architecture core II studio.
Read more on the ABC-CLIO website.
Konrad Wachsmann’s Television: Post-architectural Transmissions (Sternberg Press, 2021)
Mark Wigley
In this book, Wigley investigates the archive of modernist architect Konrad Wachsmann (1901–1980) and provides a close reading of previously unseen drawings, models, photographs, correspondence, publications, syllabi, reports, and manuscripts. Wigley then argues that the idea of television dominates the thinking behind Wachsmann’s projects. The publisher states, “The book offers a forensic analysis of a career to show that Wachsmann developed one of the most compelling manifestos of what architecture would need to become in the age of ubiquitous electronics.”
Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus of Columbia GSAPP, and has written extensively on the theory and practice of architecture.
Read more on the Sternberg Press website.
The Chinese City (Routledge, 2021)
Weiping Wu, Piper Gaubatz
This book provides an overview of China’s urbanization and cities, through the lenses of spatial sciences, including geography, urban studies, urban planning, and environmental studies. The publisher states, “The book highlights both parallels and substantive differences between China and comparable cities and countries elsewhere, given that some urban conditions around the world converge and point to shared catalysts (e.g. internal migration) and globally linked processes (e.g. climate change). It explores the consequences of the demographic, economic, social, and environmental transitions on cities and urban dwellers.”
Weiping Wu is the Interim Dean, Professor, and Director of the M.S. and PhD in Urban Planning programs at Columbia GSAPP. Her research focuses on global urbanization with a specific expertise in issues of migration, housing, and infrastructure of Chinese cities. She is currently leading the spring 2022 Urban Planning Thesis/Capstone II course at GSAPP.
Read more on the Routledge website.
Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (Museum of Modern Art, 2021)
This publication accompanied the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America at the Museum of Modern Art organized and curated by Mabel O. Wilson ‘91 MArch, Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor at GSAPP, and Sean Anderson, Associate Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA. Among the exhibition participants and members of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) are GSAPP alumni and faculty members Emanuel Admassu ‘12 MSAAD ‘13 AAR, Assistant Professor; J. Yolande Daniels ‘90 MArch; Mario Gooden ‘90 MArch, Professor of Professional Practice and Interim Director of MArch Program; V. Mitch McEwen ‘06 MArch; and Amanda Williams, Adjunct Associate Professor; alongside Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, Felecia Davis, Walter Hood, and Olalekan Jeyifous. The exhibition also features newly commissioned multi-media work by David Hartt.
The exhibition is an investigation into the intersections of architecture, Blackness and anti–Black racism in the American context. This accompanying publication, or “field guide,” includes scholarly essays by the curators, members of the advisory committee, and invited scholars in addition to the exhibition participants.
TEMPLE HOYNE BUELL CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE
Green Reconstruction: A Curricular Toolkit for the Built Environment, published by the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture in 2021 and available as a downloadable PDF, is aimed towards educators in the planning and design of the built environment. The authors state, “Green Reconstruction is an outline, an open work, for the repair of a world ravaged by three intersecting crises—of mutual care, of racial oppression, and of climate, all intersecting in turn with economic inequality—that moves along two axes, the Green axis of ecological transformation, and the gilded axis of material redistribution, or Reconstruction.”
Learn more on the Buell Center’s Power website.
COLUMBIA BOOKS ON ARCHITECTURE AND THE CITY PUBLICATIONS
Art after Liberalism (2021)
Nicholas Gamso
Art after Liberalism is an account of creative practice at a moment of converging social crises. It is also an inquiry into emergent ways of living, acting, and making art in the company of others.
Learn more on the Columbia Books on Architecture and the City website.
Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound (2021)
Natasha Ginwala, Gal Kirn, Niloufar Tajeri
As master fictions of the sovereign nation-state implode, and the hegemonic silencing of the dispossessed reveals the cracks in governability, Nights of the Dispossessed: Riots Unbound brings together artistic works, political texts, critical urban analyses, and research projects from across the world in an endeavor to “sense,” chronicle, and think through recent riots and uprisings—evoking a phenomenology of the multitude and surplus population.
Learn more on the Columbia Books on Architecture and the City website.