Caitlin Blanchfield

Caitlin Blanchfield is a Doctoral Candidate in Architecture at Columbia GSAPP, where she also received an M.S. in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture. Caitlin is a founding editor of the Avery Review, and her recent book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image, co-authored with Farzin Lotfi-Jam, was published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City in 2019. Her writing has appeared in the Avery Review, Artforum, New Geographies, Log, and elsewhere, and her work has been shown in the Oslo Architecture Triennale, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and The Shed.

She is currently working on her dissertation, which examines architectural and territorial formations of settler colonialism in North America. Investigating federally-funded scientific research installations constructed from the 1950s-1980s, the research addresses how Cold War-era science participated in the settlement of landscapes perceived as inhospitable, arguing that research infrastructures are an extension of a settler colonial project to expropriate Indigenous lands through the epistemological and material processes of knowledge production. Further, it examines how Indigenous opposition to land occupations constitute exercises of self-determination and thus refuse liberal forms of governance.