The MIT Department of Architecture is pleased to announce our spring 2021 online public program. This spring, we turn with hope, but not certainty, to our post-pandemic future. Against what we cannot know, we turn to what we can; to history, and in particular to its alternatives, its margins, and its new, creative possibilities. We will explore the architecture of the Amazon, concrete architecture in the Global South, and mapping the architectural history of Cairo. We will examine the materiality of production and the materiality of race, spaces of care and spaces between, and inescapable history of identity and information. We look back to native title and all around us at the invisible architecture of criminal justice and incarceration. And we take all of these discussions as imperatives for new modes of thinking, and making, together.
Like everything we do, this lecture series is a collaboration between the diverse faculty, staff, and students of MIT’s Department of Architecture, which includes designers, historians, critics, theorists, and experts in computation. Beyond the events developed across the department’s diverse approaches to architectural knowledge, students continue to create new forms of programming; from online radio stations, like WAWD Radio, to platforms for sharing parts of life that exist out of frame and open-source, and film series and conversations on Cinema and the Architectural Imagination.
Events are held online and streamed on our Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter channels. Lectures are posted afterward on YouTube. We invite you to explore the full public program below and find more details, including links to webcasts, on our events calendar. Learn more about our public programs, exhibitions, and news at architecture.mit.edu.
Spring 2021 Public Program, MIT Department of Architecture
“NAMA and the architecture of the Amazon”
A Research Studio conversation with Marcos Cereto, Angelo Bucci, and Xhulio Binjaku
February 25
Mohamed Kamal Elshahed
Author, Curator, and Architectural Historian
“Surveying Modern Architecture: The Case of Cairo”
Presented with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture
March 4
Christiana Moss
Principal, Studio Ma
“Joy Within”
Presented with the Building Technology Group
March 11
Book Celebration: Lenssen, León, Vicario
A conversation with alumni Anneka Lenssen, Ana María León, and Niko Vicario on their recently published books
A History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program event
March 15
“Future Blueprints of Justice”
A Research Studio conversation with Oana Stănescu and the Stanford Legal Design Lab
March 18
“Conversations on Care: Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Think Tank”
Presented with the Critical Broadcasting Lab
March 25
Launch event: Thresholds 49: Supply
Featuring editors Nina Wexelblatt and Jack Hanly with Timothy Hyde and contributors to the issue
April 1
Mariam Kamara
Principal, atelier masōmī
“How we narrate our yesterday determines how we imagine the future of architecture”
April 8
Michelle Moore Apotsos
Associate Professor, Department of Art, Williams College
“Lived Heritage and the Sacred Topography of Harar Jugol, Ethiopia”
An Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture event
April 12
“Happening Now”
A Research Studio conversation with Catie Newell, Virginia Sanfratello, Brandon Clifford, and Zain Karsan
April 15
Azra Akšamija
Associate Professor, MIT Architecture
"Future Heritage"
Presented with the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology
April 22
Herzog & de Meuron
Christine Binswanger and Jason Frantzen
“The Hospital / The Allure of Complexity”
A talk by Christine Binswanger followed by a conversation with Hashim Sarkis and Jason Frantzen
The 30th Arthur H. Schein Memorial Lecture
April 23
Joseph Kunkel
Executive Director, The Sustainable Native Communities Collaborative
"Bridging Boundaries in Native and non-Native Communities: An architecture for wealth-building and equitable opportunity"
MIT NOMAS Lecture
April 29
Engineering Independence: Concrete Architecture in the Global South
A symposium in collaboration with the Building Technology Group
April 30
Felecia Davis
Associate Professor, Penn State College of Arts and Architecture
“Seams: Race, Architecture, and Design Computing”
Presented with the Design and Computation Group
May 6
Shaden M. Tageldin
Associate Professor, Cultural Studies & Comparative Literature, University of Minnesota
“The Place of Africa, in Theory”
An Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture event
May 10
Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Assistant professor of African American and Black Diasporic art in the Departments of African American Studies and Art and Archaeology at Princeton University
“Vision and Value: Cotton and the Materiality of Race”
Presented with the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art program
May 13
“Hawai'i Non-Linear”
A Research Studio conversation with Chris Leong, Dominic Leong, and Sean Connelly
May 20
Our spring 2021 online public program is supported in-part by the Arthur H. Schein (1951) Memorial Fund.
#BlackLivesMatter.
