Introduction

2:00 – 2:30 PM

Getting to know each other and the scope of the seminar

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Discourse

2:30 – 4:00 PM

The Devil’s in the Details

Lecture by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Harvard Graduate School of Design

Every decision planners make in a design process has an impact when implemented, not only on the site of construction, but also on the site of extraction and of production. From the window frames of a house to the concrete pillars of a highway bridge, from the wood flooring of a living room to the asphalt of our streets, and from the steel bolts of a door to the trees species of a park, choices about the materiality of the built environment have a global knock-on effect. In this discussion, the author argues it is necessary to politicize details and components in order to connect them to contemporary forms of resource extraction and appropriation, as well as, ultimately, to rethink the production of our infrastructure, our cities, our homes and our lives.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Malterre-Barthes’ teaching and research interests are related to how design disciplines can critically engage with issues of resources, the mainstream economy, governance, and ecological/social justice. Principal of the urban design agency OMNIBUS, she holds a PhD from ETH Zürich on the effects of the political economy of food on the built environment. As guest professor at TU Berlin (2018-2019) she investigated and challenged the predatorily modus operandi of real estate in the German capital, and as program director of the Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at the chair of Marc Angélil (2014-2019) focused on informal housing, migration and inclusivity in Mediterranean cities, co-publishing Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (2017) and Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (2020). Co-curator of the 12th International Architecture Biennale of São Paulo (2019), she also co-authored Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (Edition Patrick Frey) and Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun. Charlotte is a founding member of the Parity Group and Front, activist networks dedicated to improving gender equality and equity in architecture.

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Method

4:30 – 6:00 PM

4An Eviscerated Goldfinch and Other Examples

Lecture by Cameron Hu, Konrad Lorenz Institute

Writers concerned with the architecture of collective life lately fashion “material” things into examples. What goes on in making an example of something? This is a metatheoretical talk about the fabrication of examples, and about the (political) logics of exemplification that control what we talk about and decline to talk about when we talk about “materiality.” I consider what we are doing with our examples of “material” life, what we are presupposing through them, and the compulsions and entailments of doing and presupposing like so; examined, these compulsions and entailments invite reconsideration of disreputable concepts of fate, tragedy, and necessity; that invitation leads, in turn, to an uncomfortable idea about the intimacy of knowledge and destruction. I dramatize this consideration of conceptual practice through a series of examples real and fictional, ethnographic and canonical, drawn from past and future work—the first of which is a poor joke about an ill-fated goldfinch.

Cameron Hu is an anthropologist of technoscientific capitalism and liberal empire. His ethnographic and historical research focuses on the multinational oil corporation, the disciplines of the earth sciences, and liberal grammars of historicity, futurity, and action; his theoretical work considers the provocations of ordinary language philosophy and psychoanalysis for social thought. He has published widely in forums for critical theory, science studies, art criticism, and literary nonfiction. With the LiCo collective he produces fictions and films, most lately the video “This Extraordinary Rock,” shown at Het Nieuw Instituut in Rotterdam. Cameron received a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Chicago in 2021, and is currently postdoctoral fellow at the Konrad Lorenz Institute (Austria). He is at work on an ethnography, Knowing Destroying: The Geopolitics of Fracking and the Metaphysics of Imperialism.

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