Architectures of Control and Resistance: New Histories of Architecture and Politics in the 20th Century

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image / Piergianna Mazzocca

Overview

Hybrid Symposium

This year's hybrid symposium held by Cornell University's History of Architecture and Urbanism Society aims to explore architectural histories that grapple with the scarring and marring of lands, buildings, and bodies caused by enforced occupation, violent displacement, and extractive practices associated with modernity under totalitarian, colonial, or neo-colonial regimes during the 20th century, in any part of the world.

As with other fields in the humanities, architectural history has been grappling with new ways to activate critical consciousness of the ongoing unjust systems of power-knowledge and address the coloniality of modernity in architecture worldwide. We ask: how can our histories of architecture unsettle the coloniality of race, violence, and place? How can we disturb the imperial imaginations that define modernism in and of architecture? Finally, can our work activate transformative practices of resistance and reinscription in both historical and architectural thinking?

This symposium will address these disciplinary challenges by showcasing research that reconsiders and expands our knowledge about the role that architecture played in building the structures of power supporting fascism, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism during the 1900s. Papers should explore specific architectural, spatial, and material practices and expose how they helped occupy, tame, discipline, and control places and people — as well as the nonhuman, the natural, and the material. In seeking histories and discourses that are neither exclusionary nor limited to established colonial and imperial realities, we particularly welcome work that sheds light on the histories of contested spaces and architectures and on voices of anticolonial agency, heterogeneity, and intersectional diversity.

Schedule

Application Deadline
February 17, 2023

Selection Notification
February 24, 2023

Draft Submission
March 24, 2023

Full Draft Submission
April 14, 2023

Symposium Date
April 24, 2023 — in person and online

April 24 Symposium Schedule

Morning

9–9:10 a.m.: Opening Remarks and Introduction
9:10–10:20 a.m.: Keynote Presentation — Huda Tayob, University of Manchester
10:20–10:45 a.m.: Coffee Break
10:45 a.m.–12: p.m.: Session One — Designs to Educate, Check, Confine

10:45–11 a.m: Maggie Freeman (MIT) // "Principle for Desert Control:" Architecture, Imperialism, and Nomadic Peoples During the British Mandate (1920–1948)
11–11:15 a.m.: Jeroen Stevens (KU Leuven) // Homelessness & Incarceration. The Architecture of Penalized Poverty in New York's Almhouse and Lodging House (1700–1940)
11:15–11:30 a.m.: Najia Fatima online (Columbia University) // Colonial Traditions: Village Modernities. Making the Artisan in Rural Indian Subcontinent, 1880–1925
11:30 a.m.–12 p.m.: Discussion moderated by Maria Luisa Palumbo, Cornell University

12–1:15 p.m.: Lunch Break

Afternoon

1:15–2:45 p.m.: Session Two — Voices of Anticolonial Agencies

1:15–1:30 p.m.: Maria Paz Agundez (TU Berlin) // Unsettling the European Border on Africa: How Spanish Muslims (and Migrant Communities) Reclaim the Center
1:30–1:45 p.m.: Amina Kaskar (KU Leuven) // The 'Indian Delights' Cookbook: Gendered Agent of Soft Architectural Practice
1:45–2 p.m.: Angelika Joseph online (Princeton University) // Wounded Knee II: Why Re-engage Spatial Histories of Violence?
2–2:15 p.m.: Niloofar Rasooli online (ETH Zurich) // She, Who Grows Everywhere: A History of Walls, Words, and Feminist Resilience in Iran
2:15–2:45 p.m.: Discussion moderated by Asya Ece Uzmay, Cornell University

2:45–3 p.m.: Coffee Break

3–4:30 p.m.: Session Three - Techniques and Coloniality

3–3:15 p.m.: Robin Haranto Honggare (Columbia University) // Soil, Fire, and Plantations: The Scale of Matter in Colonial Sumatra
3:15–3:30 p.m.: Lizzie Yarina (MIT) // A History of Mekong Delta Plans: From "Full Water Control" to "Actively Living with Water" in Vietnam's Mekong Delta
3:30–3:45 p.m.: Guillermo S. Arsuaga (Princeton University) // Amalur's Defiance: Environmental and Linguistic Resistance on Pheasant Island
3:45–4 p.m.: Tiago Patatas (Royal College of Art) and Raya Leary (unaffiliated) online // Into the Blind Distance: French Nuclearization from a Ruin in the Azores, 1961–1974
4–4:30 p.m.: Discussion moderated by Eun-Jeong Kim, Cornell University

4:30–4:45 p.m.: Closing Remarks

Submission Details

Submit your paper title and abstract (250–300 words) with your name and affiliation through the Cornell AAP website form by February 17, 2023.

Authors of accepted papers will be notified by February 24, 2023, via email and will be asked to submit a full draft (3,000–3,200 words) by April 14, 2023.