Abundance Talk #1

From bespoke column capitals to sinuous settlement paths, the architectural means of settling the bounds of abundance in the 18th and 19th Centuries spanned from the detailed to the territorial. In the first of Buell’s Abundance Talks, Jennifer Chuong will address Benjamin Latrobe’s “American Order,” a veritable making-stone of agrarian abundance, and Maura Lucking will reveal the pitched-roofed architecture of “Indian cottages” as a means of imperialism. Daniel Abramson will respond.

RSVP for in-person attendance at buellcenter@columbia.edu, or register for the webinar here.

Jennifer Chuong (Harvard)
Maura Lucking (UW-Milwaukee/Buell Fellow)
Response by Daniel Abramson (Boston University)

Jennifer Chuong is a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. Her research centers on the art, architecture, and material culture of the eighteenth-century transatlantic world, particularly their intersection with histories of race and the environment. Recent publications have focused on the frontispiece portrait of Phillis Wheatley, the tacit protests of revolutionary printers, and the nature of early American veneer furniture. Dr. Chuong is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Surface Experiments: Art, Nature, and the Making of Early British America.”

Maura Lucking is a historian of architectural modernism and American empire. Her book project, Settler Campus, is an architectural history of the public college movement that examines policy, land use, campus planning, and design pedagogy across three rarely integrated sites: the Land Grant colleges, industrial institutes, and Indian boarding schools. New research considers the entanglement of state, missionary, and philanthropic homebuilding projects in nineteenth century Indian country. She holds a Ph.D. from UCLA and is a current fellow of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture and Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University and assistant professor of architectural history at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Daniel M. Abramson is Professor of Architectural History at Boston University and presently at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton). He is the author of three books, including Obsolescence: An Architectural History, and co-editor of two Aggregate volumes, most recently Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century. Current work is on American government centers architecture since 1900, in terms of federalism, capitalism, citizenship, and trust.