HOUSE & HOME

HOUSE & HOME inaugurates the re-imagined HOME symposium organized by the Black Student Alliance at Columbia GSAPP [BSA+GSAPP]. Newly staged as a virtual series of conversations, exchanges, and workshops, BSA+GSAPP elaborates on and delves more deeply into the originally framed themes of HOME.

In this conversation between architecturally trained visual artist Amanda Williams and architect, educator, and author, Professor Hansy Better Barraza, BSA+GSAPP members, Malcolm Rio, Skylar Royal, and Ife Salema Vanable explore forms of cultural production in which “house” and “home,” mobilized as architectural allegory and material object (“thing,” with its attendant systems of construction, finance, land, and labor), advance and/or refute claims on agency, authorship and normativity.

In an uncanny analysis of the “WAP” music video, among others, this dynamic group of interlocutors asks: What happens when the house truly is infinitely open? What happens after enclosure? What happens when the figures of the brothel or the queer home are overt sites for capital accumulation and extraction by corporate interests? What are the aesthetics—patterns, textures, orders—and moralizing tendencies of constructions of class and racial difference perpetrated by way of house and home?

Challenging conceptions of what constitutes legitimate objects of architectural analysis, speculation, historiography, and practice, Amanda Williams and Hansy Better Barraza likewise lead an interrogation of and meditation on the academy, particularly the so-called Ivy league, as home away from home of sorts, and forms of “pedagogical upbringing” against conceptions of gender and racial difference. Considering space, politics, and the power of excess, this conversation hopes to make space for a generous, shared mode of study exploring the impositions, desires, production and assembly, making and imagining of HOUSE & HOME.

REGISTER TO ATTEND

Free and open to the public. Virtual events hosted on Zoom Webinar do not require an account to attend, advanced registration is encouraged.

GSAPP is committed to providing universal access to all of our virtual events. Please contact Lyla Catellier via email at events@arch.columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.