Writing Land into Architectural Histories
image / Asya Ece Uzmay
Overview
The spring 2024 symposium "Writing Land into Architectural Histories," organized by the doctoral students in Cornell University's History of Architecture and Urbanism Society (HAUS), aims to explore the entangled histories of the built environment, land, and ecologies, examining intertwined methodologies that address questions of writing land into and out of histories of architecture.
The combinatory practices of both architectural and landscape architectural history have grappled with new ways to interrogate the instrumentality of land as a mechanism that perpetuates relationships of power. How do land policies integrate into the built environment to produce various forms of skill and expertise that challenge normative, often colonial and imperial, forms of knowledge production? How does the materiality of land shape architecture? How do technologies of land and state-making processes move bodies across land? How do various forms of colonialism imbue structural histories of violence on and to land?
Spanning a broad temporal range and extending to various geographies, we invite doctoral students working on the built environment in any discipline to rethink ways of utilizing land as a method in transnational and transimperial histories of architecture. Papers can include, but are not limited to: soils and their relationship to building practices and techniques; medicalization and health measurements; land and ecological governance; property rights and land-use schemes; cultivation and resource management through surveying technologies and agricultural infrastructures; representations of land; models of community and solidarity building through land traditions; labor; and methodologies of multispecies histories of architecture.
This will be an in-person symposium.
Schedule
- January 5, 2024 — Abstracts Submission Deadline
- January 12, 2024 — Accepted Abstracts Notifications Out
- March 4, 2024 — Deadline for Accepted Papers Submission
- March 22, 2024 — Symposium Date
Submission Information
Please submit a 250–300 word abstract with your name and affiliated institution and a 1–2 page C.V. through this submission form by January 5, 2024.
Authors of accepted papers will be notified on January 12, 2024.
Keynote Speaker
Hollyamber Kennedy
Northwestern University
Hollyamber Kennedy (she/her) researches and teaches modern architectural and landscape history, with an emphasis on heritage politics and the material and environmental legacies of colonial building cultures and land practices. Focusing on transregional links between sub-Saharan Africa and Central and Eastern Europe, her work investigates the ways in which architecture and infrastructure facilitated imperial governance and reshaped agrarian modernities through rural modernization projects across the 19th and 20th centuries. Her current book project, (Un)settling Territory, which emerges out of her doctoral research, examines the visual and technical building cultures of two ministry-supported "settler-state" projects in the non-aligned jurisdictions of German South-West Africa, present-day Namibia, and the German states of Posen and West Prussia, in present-day Poland.
Kennedy is coeditor (with Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi) of the forthcoming volume Settlement (gta Verlag, 2025) and the forthcoming volume Insurgent Domesticities. Her articles have appeared in Grey Room, The Journal of Architecture, Arch+, and The Avery Review. She is a contributor to the volumes German Colonialism in Africa and Its Legacies: Architecture, Art, Urbanism & Visual Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023), German Colonial Building Cultures, a Global Architectural History in 100 Visual Primary Sources (Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2023), Unearthing Traces: Dismantling the Imperialist Entanglement of Archives and the Built Environment (EPFL Press and CAN Centre d’Art Neuchâtel, 2023), Documents of Contemporary Art: Craft (Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press, 2018), and Glass! Love!! Perpetual Motion!!! A Paul Scheerbart Reader (University of Chicago Press, 2014).
Kennedy has received grants and fellowships from the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University, the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, the Mellon Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, Humboldt University, the DAAD, the Max Planck-Kunsthistorisches Institute, and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, which awarded her the Carter Manny Dissertation Prize in 2018.
Kennedy serves on the Board of Directors of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative. She is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board for the Research and Mediation Project "A Future for Whose Past? The Heritage of Minorities, Fringe Groups and People Without a Lobby," for the Architectural Heritage Year 2025 / ICOMOS Suisse. Kennedy codirects the Settlement project, and she is a member of the international research collective Insurgent Domesticities.
Organizers
Priyanka Sen / ps2242@cornell.edu
Asya Ece Uzmay / au98@cornell.edu
Qianye Yu / qy238@cornell.edu
And members of the History of Architecture and Urbanism Society (HAUS) Cornell University Graduate Student Group
