ORDER! : The Spatial Ideologies of Carbon Modernity

With the onset of the industrial revolution, a new spatial order emerged—one that is not only energy-intensive, but one that also writes the social and economic structures of an industrial and extractive society into concrete, steel, and glass. As part of the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form, on view now through April 26 in The Cooper Union’s Arthur A. Houghton Jr. Gallery, this symposium gathers architects, designers, scholars, historians, and theorists to identify and study the specific spatial concepts of that order—a necessary undertaking if architecture is to address the climate crisis.

This event, which is free and open to the general public, will be conducted in-person in The Cooper Union Frederick P. Rose Auditorium and through Zoom. 

Register here to attend in-person.
Register here to attend through zoom.

The symposium will consist of three sessions, each of which will be organized in a point-counterpoint structure: two presentations will focus on a specific characteristic of carbon modernity, while a third will discuss a specific precedent or model that might contain the seeds of a counter-project. The first session, Temporal & Typological Order, looks at the imposition of new temporal and spatial orders as central to the project of industrialization. Talks will focus on the formation of the working class, which increased the separation between production and social reproduction, as well as the emergence of new architectural typologies. Both dramatically affected the spatial organization of social relations. The second session, Expansion vs. Atomization, looks at the contradictory tendencies of development under fossil fuels: on one hand, the tendency for infrastructural integration in the service of totalizing expansion; on the other, the atomization and individuation brought about by the extreme commodification of space and an advanced real estate market. The third and final session, Abstraction & Land Hunger, focuses on the role abstraction has played throughout carbon modernity, not only as an aesthetic concept, but also as a way of perceiving land and resources. Together, these presentations will emphasize how spatial concepts become ideological, imbricating aesthetic expression with the political unfolding of human relations.

Elisa Iturbe, assistant professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, will deliver the opening remarks followed by presentations and discussions including Kathi Weeks, Esra Akcan, Cameron McEwan, Ross Exo Adams, Matthew Soules, Ana María Durán, Catherine Ingraham, Gary Fields, and David Wengrow.

Confronting Carbon Form is presented by Cooper Union’s The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture and co-curated by Assistant Professor Iturbe alongside Stanley Cho and Alican Taylan. The exhibition repositions architecture’s relationship to energy, implicating architectural and urban form’s role in the creation and perpetuation of the anthropogenic climate crisis in a way that looks beyond the immediate quantification of a carbon footprint. The exhibition examines history and precedent to assess the archetypes, typologies, and concepts that must now be transformed—an undertaking that is just as important for understanding architecture’s complicity in the climate crisis as it is for locating a fruitful terrain for climate action.