Felicity Scott

Felicity D. Scott is professor of architecture, director of the PhD program in Architecture (History and Theory), and co-director of the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. At Columbia she is also on the Executive Committee of the Center for Comparative Media and Affiliated Faculty with the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. Scott’s work as a historian focuses on relations among architecture, media, and technopolitical or geopolitical transformations, as well as the institutions and discourses that inform these relations in the mid-to-late 20th century. From studies of experimental and alternative architectures, as well as environmental and social movements of the 1960s and 1970s and their integration into or deployment by dominant formations to work focused on major research and global governing institutions, her scholarship draws out the complex, multi-facetted, and shifting mechanisms within and through which architecture and media operate in and on the world. Her books include Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism (MIT Press, 2007), Ant Farm (ACTAR, 2008), Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counter-Insurgency (Zone Books, 2016), and Disorientations: Bernard Rudofsky in the Empire of Signs (Sternberg Press, 2016).

Beyond books and articles on architecture and media, Scott writes extensively on contemporary art for magazines, exhibition catalogs, and edited anthologies. She recently completed a manuscript titled Earthlike: Space Colonization, Manifest Destiny, and the Design of Future Worlds, a study reconstructing American space colonization narratives and programs from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s as they responded to an era of decolonization, emergent computerized information networks, and new economies, forging the imaginaries and techniques of power fueling the rise of Silicon Valley rocketeers and the satellite industry.

Scott received her PhD from Princeton University. She also holds an M.A.U.D. from Harvard University, a B.Arch. (First Class Honors) from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and B.Sc. from the University of Melbourne. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships including a Tsunoda Senior Fellowship from Waseda University, the German Transatlantic Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, an Asian Cultural Council grant, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts grants, a New York State Council on the Arts Independent Project Award, a Clark Fellowship, a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation grant, a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship, and a Henry Luce/ACLS Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in American Art. She was a founding co-editor of Grey Room, a quarterly journal of architecture, art, media, and politics published quarterly by MIT Press since Fall 2000, stepping down to join the Board in 2013.