Unsettling Land

This event will be held in person and on Zoom (keynote lecture, only). Please email buellcenter@columbia.edu to RSVP or register for the Zoom link here.

The Buell Center invites you to an afternoon celebrating the culmination of three interrelated timelines: a book launch capstoning the “Architecture and Land” series; the opening of “100 Links,” an installation in collaboration with AD–WO at the Chicago Architecture Biennial; and a toast to 40 years of the Buell.

The event, Unsettling Land, will host several conversations and presentations on the long history of settlement, its tools and its architectures, its struggles and its solidarities. Speakers will include: Jo Guldi (Emory) and Timothy Hyde (MIT), with responses from Aleksandr Bierig (U Toronto) and Manu Karuka (Barnard), as well as Buell Director Lucia Allais, Emanuel Admassu (AD–WO), and Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford and Andrew Schachman (Floating Museum). The event will conclude with a celebratory reception at Buell Hall, with former Buell directors as guests of honor.

Copies of Architecture and Land in and out of the Americas will be available on-site at no cost, marking the booklet’s debut in New York City, ahead of its Chicago launch on November 1.

Program:

3 PM: Work in Progress Talk
Timothy Hyde, “Eldorado Gothic,” with a response by Manu Karuka
114 Avery Hall

The Ames shovel is a tool of global settlement if there ever was one. In this talk, Hyde follows the shovel from the construction industry of New England to the mining camps of Gold Rush-era California, and from there to the historiographic propositions of Harold Kirker. Kirker’s architectural histories of California reveal a mineralogical conception of architecture, motivated not by materiality but by valuation.

4 PM: Keynote Lecture

Jo Guldi, “The Long Land War,” with a response by Aleksandr Bierig
114 Avery Hall and streaming on Zoom. Register for the Webinar here.

Land redistribution schemes have peppered the history of the globe over the last 150 years, with deep repercussions on how and why architecture built nations and fueled transnational imaginaries. Guldi’s book The Long Land War (Yale, 2022) is the first synthetic account of the global struggle for occupancy rights during this period. Guldi traces its origins in the Irish Land War starting 1879 and highlights moments in its later unfolding: from economic theorizations of squatting, to the ambitious plan for a “soil map of the world,” to the inventions of tools for participatory politics. This history affirms the possibility for an alternate conception of the built environment, one where land rights are based not in acts of private property, but on the fact of occupancy.

5:30 PM: Launch: Architecture and Land Book; This is a Rehearsal Biennial; 100 Links Installation
Lucia Allais, Buell Center
Emanuel Admassu, AD–WO
Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford and Andrew Schachman, Floating Museum
114 Avery Hall

Buell Director Allais will present a booklet capping two years of research and conversations; Admassu will discuss a Buell/AD–WO installation that reinterprets Gunters’ chains and corner mounds as tools of colonization; and curators from the Floating Museum will present their theme for the Chicago Architecture Biennial, “This is a Rehearsal”, which calls for temporary architectural exhibitions to engage with the ongoing spatial struggles of their host cities.

6:30 PM: Toast to 40 Years of the Buell
A festive celebration of the 40 years since the founding of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, in 1983, with former directors in attendance! Buell Hall 300S & 300E (Third Floor)

Please visit the Buell Center website for speaker biographies and additional details.