Harry der Boghosian Fellowship Online Symposium: Debris, Constellations, and Counter-Histories

Author(s)/Creator(s)

Leen KatribFollow
Azra Akšamija, Artist, architectural historian, Associate Professor, MIT Department of Architecture; Director of MIT Future Heritage Lab
Gastón Gordillo, Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Sylvia Lavin, Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Co-Director of the Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University; historian and curator
Jorge Otero-Pailos, Artist, preservationist, and Professor and Director of Historic Preservation, Columbia University GSAPP
Elka Krajewska, Salvage Art Institute (SAI)
Matthew Wagstaffe, Salvage Art Institute (SAI)

Document Type

Video

Date

Spring 4-8-2022

Keywords

Debris, Constellations, Counter-Histories, Symposium, Leen Katrib

Language

English

Disciplines

Architectural History and Criticism | Construction Engineering | Historic Preservation and Conservation | Other Architecture

Description/Abstract

Throughout the academic year, Leen Katrib, the school’s sixth Boghosian Fellow, has been teaching an architecture studio and two professional electives focusing on her research to deconstruct the myths surrounding Mies van der Rohe’s proposal for IIT’s post-WWII modernist campus expansion. In collecting and reconstructing materials that are often discounted from official histories on Mies’s legacy in the US, Katrib seeks to contribute to a counter-historiography that highlights Miesian modernism’s entanglement in social, racial, and bureaucratic realities that not only shaped discursive and pedagogical agendas in architecture, but arguably commenced a pattern of post-WWII university campus expansions into vulnerable neighborhoods that continue to this day to influence and shape the American university and landscape.

Organized as a live, roundtable discussion, the symposium convenes a cross-disciplinary group of scholars and practices whose work deconstructs “official” historical narratives and reconstructs counter-histories by engaging a constellational practice of grouping, arranging, or positioning seemingly disparate collections of discounted detritus to retell one possible permutation of history among infinite potential assemblages and meanings.

Michael Speaks, dean of the Syracuse University School of Architecture, along with Katrib, will moderate the discussion.

Additional Information

Participants

Azra Akšamija
Artist, architectural historian, Associate Professor, MIT Department of Architecture; Director of MIT Future Heritage Lab

Gastón Gordillo
Professor, Department of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver

Sylvia Lavin
Professor of History and Theory of Architecture, Co-Director of the Program in Media and Modernity, Princeton University; historian and curator

Jorge Otero-Pailos
Artist, preservationist, and Professor and Director of Historic Preservation, Columbia University GSAPP

Salvage Art Institute (SAI)
Elka Krajewska and Matthew Wagstaffe

Recommended Citation

Katrib, Leen; Akšamija, Azra; Gordillo, Gastón; Lavin, Sylvia; Otero-Pailos, Jorge; Krajewska, Elka; and Wagstaffe, Matthew, "Harry der Boghosian Fellowship Online Symposium: Debris, Constellations, and Counter-Histories" (2022). School of Architecture Lectures Series. 302.
https://surface.syr.edu/architecture_lectures/302

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.