April 18, 2022
This spring 2022 semester, Columbia GSAPP’s public programming built on the School’s ongoing exploration into issues such as climate change, social equity, as well as the impact of data and technology on the built environment through new forms of practices and collaboration across scales, modes of engagement, and geographies. Scroll down to view excerpted highlights, and browse through the videos on GSAPP’s online media archive.
“At the time of a project, we ask whether it will be a good ruin. If it’s a good ruin it might have the potential to be a good building. The role of time and the forces of nature and how they act on buildings is an important consideration for us in every project.”
– Brigitte Shim
Brigitte Shim, along with her partner A. Howard Sutcliffe, formed the architectural design practice Shim-Sutcliffe Architects in 1994. Their critical design practice reflects their shared interest in and passion for the integration and interrelated scales of architecture, landscape, and interior and industrial design.
"The entire structure of the shop is a flat vault ceiling, which is made out of 169 stone elements that are woven in a process of construction … [The vault] creates a dialogue with the site in terms of techniques rather than in forms and shapes.”
– Yousef Anastas on his design of an extension to the 12th-century St. Mary of the Resurrection Abbey in Jerusalem
Elias Anastas and Yousef Anastas are co-founders of the Bethlehem- and Paris-based AAU ANASTAS studio.
“It really is better for us as preservationists to lead in mediating between old aspirations and new realities, between underprotection on the one hand and overprotection on the other, between our clinging to accuracy and our need to allow for difference, richness, and brightness, between our passion for the prototype and our urgent need to protect what we can, while we still can.”
– Sara Bronin
Sara Bronin delivered the 2022 Paul S. Byard Memorial Lecture at GSAPP. Bronin is a Professor at Cornell’s College of Architecture Art & Planning, and an Associate Member of the Cornell Law Faculty.
“I look especially to the age of industrialization and how the spatializing and spatial practices introduced by technical production serve to foreground a union between ethics and aesthetics deployed to forge new social identities for urban residents. Central to this analysis is a messy juncture of bodies, architectures, and technologies where the body—the working body in particular—serves as a suture between the construction of ideology on the one hand and the control of social identity on the other.”
– Jay Cephas
Jay Cephas delivered the 2022 Detlef Mertins Lecture on the Histories of Modernity. Cephas is an assistant professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University School of Architecture.
“I embraced performance as, on one hand, a medium to bring language into the gallery space. I was going a lot of research and I didn’t want to make people stand around in a gallery and read. Performance also became a way of exploring how institutions produce subjects.”
– Andrea Fraser
Andrea Fraser is Professor, Head of Interdisciplinary Studio, and Chair of the Department of Art at the University of California, Los Angeles. This lecture, which was delivered as a live event only, was organized by the M.S. in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture Program at GSAPP.
“I always tell people who work in my office: if everything is going great, it’s your project,” Solomonoff said. “The moment something goes wrong, it’s my project, so don’t try to cover a mistake … I think [it’s important to] create a supportive environment where difficulties are part of everyday making.”
– Galia Solomonoff
Galia Solomonoff is an associate professor of professional practice at GSAPP and principal of the New York City-based SAS/Solomonoff Architecture Studio.
“Land doesn’t necessarily end at the ocean or the sky—it’s all interconnected in the pacific world view as with many other sorts of indigenous world views: this idea of continuity of resources that support us versus land as a commodity.”
– Sean Connelly
Sean Connelly is an adjunct assistant professor at Columbia GSAPP and founder of AFTER OCEANIC (Projects for Architecture Landscape Infrastructure and Art).
“The Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum is sort of incomplete in terms of its physical form. It’s more like a fragment … each vault structure is misaligned; they’re not precisely parallel to the layout but you can feel [how] this idea of incompleteness tries to weave the urban fabric.”
– Zhu Pei on his design of the Jingdezhen Imperial Kiln Museum in China
Zhu Pei is the Founder of the Studio Zhu-Pei, and Dean and Professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing.
“I want to create something with more intention and more of a conceptual narrative and analysis that deployed the blend of the informal language of markets and settlements of Lagos, Nigeria with sci-fi language and aesthetic, so Shanty Megastructures was born out of that.”
– Olalekan Jeyifous
Olalekan Jeyifous is a Brooklyn-based artist and Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture.