Spring events and opportunities

The Encounters series
What happens when you detach the study of American architecture (the Buell Center’s founding mission) from the inherited temporalities of United States national history, periodized, as it tends to be, by the fundamental rupture of the American Revolution? What phenomena help us think of the built environment in the Americas germinating across vaster territories and wider spans of time? One answer emerges from literature that shows architecture as a stage for and product of a long series of encounters, which have always included the transmission of architectural knowledge. The Buell’s Encounters Series hosts speakers who tell stories of such encounters, both historical and contemporary, that have shaped American built environments.

Speaker: Byron Hamann; a response by Benjamin Anderson (Cornell)
“Rome-Tenochtitlán: Nahua Encounters with Ruined Cities in the 1520s”
February 26, 2026, 12pm EST, 300S Buell Hall (Columbia University)
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For the first event in the series, Byron Hamann, a scholar of art and writing in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica and its links to Europe, will present new research on the voyage of four Nahua representatives—Indigenous Central Mexicans—who traveled to Rome in 1529. Their encounter with the Roman ruinscape, then undergoing reconstruction after the sack of 1527, recalled the familiar and recent destruction of another sacred city at home, Tenochtitlán, and thus shaped a new imagination and shared understanding of building and ruination. 

Making and Unmaking Property, a public symposium
March 13, 2026, 12–5pm EST, Fayerweather 209 (Columbia University)
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Architecture inscribes and reinscribes property regimes onto the surface of the earth. As tools of improvement and demarcation, buildings materialize otherwise abstract claims of property ownership. And in so doing, architecture also inaugurates the possibility of property destruction. 

This symposium asks how property is made and unmade—not just through legal instruments or physical acts of seizure but also, crucially, through architectural objects and processes. It will bring together architectural historians with scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and law to illuminate new questions about how architecture and property are co-constituted across symbolic, social, spatial, and material registers. 

Speakers include: Heba Alnajada (BU), Bench Ansfield (Temple), Lisa Haber-Thompson (Mt. Holyoke), R.H. Lossin (Harvard Law), Bryan Norwood (UT Austin), Bhavani Raman (U Toronto)

Sponsored events

Symposium: Unsettled in Dakar
Architectural Modernity in 20th Century Senegal
March 27, 2026, 9:30am–5:30pm, East Gallery, Buell Hall (Columbia University)
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This symposium on architecture and urban planning in Twentieth-Century Senegal spotlights new research on how the built environment in and around Dakar registered the continuities and ruptures between French rule and independence, indigenous heritage and colonial legacies.

Speakers include: Steven Nelson (UCLA); Nzinga Mboup (Worofilia); Ralph Ghoche (Barnard); Lucia Allais (Columbia); Gregory Valdespino (University of Iowa); Mamadou Diouf (Columbia); Martino Stierli (MoMA); Jana Ndiaye Berankova (Suture Press); Souleymane Bachir Diagne (Columbia); Frederick Cooper (NYU).

Symposium: "On the Edge of Legibility: Architecture and its Peripheries"
Keynote lecture: Ijlal Muzaffar, April 2, 2026, 6pm
Symposium: April 3, 2026, 9–5pm EST
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