Day job - Italian Futurist edition

I am delighted and honored to find a short essay of mine in the magisterial catalog that accompanies the exhibition, Enrico Prampolini. Futurism, Stage Design and the Polish Avant-garde Theatre. at the Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź. The exhibition is curated by Przemek Strożek, a brilliant scholar of avant-garde culture at the Institute of Art Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. The show highlights the numerous points of contact and overlap between Italian Futurism and the Polish avant gardes.

day job: edited volume edition

Four years ago, my friend Elie Haddad hatched the idea of editing a survey of architecture built around the globe during the last half century. Elie,  who I first met at the (then) Boston Architectural Center and is now Dean of the School of Architecture and Design at Lebanese American University, approached me with the idea of compiling what we hoped would become a standard text for scholars, teachers and students interested in the great diversity of architectural production in the contemporary world. We enlisted twenty collaborators, found a publisher (thank you, Ashgate!) and slowly assembled a book that carefully examines the broad range of approaches to the built environment that characterize this age of pluralism and globalization. The first copy of A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture just arrived, and I can't wait to start sharing it with colleagues and students. You can find a copy at Ashgate's website, or ask your local bookstore to order a copy.

day job, Rome edition

Continuing the video lecture theme, here is the link to the lecture I gave at the Accademia San Luca in Rome in October 2012, where I got to sit with Howard Burns and Francesco Moschini (!) in a palazzo partly remodeled by Francesco Borromini. Another bucket list item crossed off.

day job, Texas A&M edition

Back in March I gave a talk on my research in Ethiopia, called "Less Rupture than Amplification: Ethiopian Cities and Italian Colonialism" at Texas A&M University. The video is available online. Thanks to Peter Lang and Sarah Deyong for the kind invitation.

moving FIU forward

Yesterday, we hosted the FIU GoGreen team (Carrie, Ali, Connie - seen here hugging our cistern - and Jerry) whose work at FIU involves moving the university toward more sustainable operations. It's a Herculean task - the university often mirrors Miami's troubling lack of concern for environmental issues - but the Office of University Sustainability is directed by smart and energetic people who are gradually making a big difference. Take a look at their initiatives and events on FIU's campuses, and get involved.

day job, back to Milan edition

On Tuesday, I will be back in Milan to give a presentation on my book, The Battle for Modernism. The symposium is organized by Silvia Bignami and Paolo Rusconi, who just worked with Antonello Negri and other collaborators on an enormous - and important - exhibition of Italian paintings from the 1930s at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence. It is always real honor to be invited to speak about my work, but all the more so in this case, both because Milan was the center of architectural activity discussed in my book, and because I will share the dais with Paolo Nicoloso, a scholar whose work was hugely important for my dissertation research.

planning FIU

The Perkins + Will master plan for FIU’s Maidique Campus is good. There are some particularly good places in the plan where the architects have laid out new courtyard spaces that echo the scale of the campus’s more successful outdoor spaces. The new courtyards promise to help foster and sustain discourse by creating gathering places for the academic community. There are, however, some limitations to the plan:  

view from the home office

Working at home, with breaks to plant more leafy greens and herbs in the garden, reveling in the beautiful "winter" weather.

trees, streets and empires

Sudan Street, Addis Ababa

The history of Addis Ababa is intricately linked to its trees. The city was given its name, which means “New Flower,” by the Empress Taitu in what may have been a reference to the area’s plentiful mimosa trees. Yet within a few years of Emperor Menelik II making the city his permanent capital around 1887, the sovereign considered relocating because of the deforestation caused by felling trees for construction materials and firewood. The introduction of Australian eucalyptus trees in 1905, probably by two French diplomats, saved the city. Eucalyptus grows quickly in the Ethiopian highlands, and will grow a new trunk from the stump of a cut tree. It made an ideal resource for construction and firewood – a role it still serves – and has naturalized throughout much of the country. When the Italians made Addis Ababa the capital of their African empire in 1936, they brought a new set of trees with them.

day job, indoor edition

Archival materials can be incredibly helpful for the kind of research I’m doing on architecture and urbanism in East Africa. These resources can be correspondence and other written documents (logs, contracts, diaries, receipts, reports), photographs, drawings, maps, catalogs, brochures, and objects of all sorts. Often these materials are conserved in archives and libraries, but not always; on Thursday I am going to visit the offices of a construction company that has been based in Eritrea and Ethiopia since the 1930s, and which has a large collection of photographs documenting their work over the years. The material I’ve looked at so far in the Ethiopian National Archives and the Institute for Ethiopian Studies has been very revealing for two main reasons: it documents the processes of construction in great detail and it helps establish a clear chronology of the layers of development in East African metropolises. In both cases the archival evidence often contradicts later written accounts or fills in the vast gaps in our knowledge.

day job, outdoor edition

We haven't posted on tin box for a while now, but things are progressing at the house. We'll have updates on construction later in August.

One reason for the lack of updates is that I've been in Ethiopia since June, conducting research for two book projects about modern architecture and urbanism here. The first book will deal with the period of Italian colonization in East Africa (1935-41) and the second will look at the whole arc of modernization in Ethiopia since the reign of Menelik II. This research has been exciting, in part because I came here with far fewer expectations and assumptions than I had when I started the dissertation studies that led to my first book. The paucity of historical scholarship on modern architecture and urbanism in Africa means that I had to approach Ethiopia prepared to improvise. And Ethiopia rewards improvisation.

detroit

Detroit has become a metonym for “urban decay,” a pejorative term that misleadingly implies that cities are primarily responsible for their own decline. As Detroit’s manufacturing economy has relocated (first to other states, then overseas) and its population has shrunk by half, the city fabric has suffered from neglect, abandonment, arson and poor redevelopment decisions. Meadows and parking lots have replaced too many buildings, leaving the city fabric as a patchwork quilt with pockets of vitality isolated by vast swaths of open space. So why is Detroit such a wonderful city?

day job, ultra grateful edition

I just got back from the annual meeting of the Society of Architectural Historians in Detroit, where I had the extraordinarily great fortune to receive the society's Founders' Award. The award recognizes an article published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, which, in this case, was the essay I wrote on Italian colonial urban planning in Ethiopia. It was really humbling to listen to Marta Gutman, the jury chair, read the citation and realize that so many of the people in the room had taken the time to mentor, guide or nudge me in some important way over the last fifteen years. For someone who still sees himself as an architect learning how to write, and to think like a historian, the society's recognition means a lot.

The collegiality of the community of scholars is amazing, and also bears mentioning. Discourse, collaboration, mentorship and service are all essential parts of what drives the production of knowledge. It's a privilege to be a part of this world.

Boston

Flying home from a few days in Boston for the centennial ACSA Annual Meeting offers a chance to reflect on architecture and education. Boston is where Holly and I started studying architecture (at the Boston Architectural Center) and it’s clear that the city itself remains one of the most influential components of our intellectual formation. How so?

day job, continued

Our exhibition, Metropole/Colony: Africa and Italy, opened Wednesday night at the Frost Art Museum on FIU's main campus. My colleague, Elysse Newman, took some great photos of the opening with her iPhone. The exhibition is open until April 14. On February 1, I'll be giving a brief gallery talk at 6pm.

day job, exhibitions edition

Four new exhibitions open tonight at the Frost Art Museum at FIU, including Metropole/Colony: Africa and Italy. I curated the show with Jon Mogul of the Wolfsonian-FIU. The exhibit uses materials from the Wolfsonian collections to explore the relationship between material culture (all of the physical and visual stuff a society produces) in Italy and its colonies during the 1930s. I'm particularly interested in the relationship between Italy and its African colonies: Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia and Libya.
[update: photos from the opening]

day job, unexpected honor edition

I just heard this morning that the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the Journal of Architectural Education awarded my article, "Misprision of Precedent: Design as Creative Misreading" the 2011-2012 Journal of Architectural Education, Best Scholarship of Design Article Award. This is a huge honor, and I feel very, very fortunate.

I owe a great debt of thanks to Holly, who first suggested the idea for the article, and our friends, Tony DeLeon and Nate Zelnick, who read drafts and encouraged me to send it in.

day job, peer-reviewed edition

By sheer coincidence, two scholarly articles of mine are appearing in print at the same time. One is excerpted from a chapter on Italian fascist-era urban design in my forthcoming book, and is published in the January issue of Planning Perspectives. The other is an essay on urban design in Italy's East African colonies, which came out in the December issue of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. It's a real honor to print work in two journals I respect profoundly.

Above, an image of the Esposizione Universale di Roma from the exhibition "Metropole/Colony," which I'm curating with Jon Mogul of the Wolfsonian. It will open in the Wolfsonian's teaching gallery at the Frost Museum on FIU's main campus next month.

Day job, lectures and exhibition edition

Last night, my friend Aziza Chaouni spoke at FIU about the work her firm, Bureau E.A.S.T., has done in Morocco. She also gave our students a preview of the exhibition that will open this evening, Salon de B.E.A.S.T., as part of the Humanities Afternoon organized by FIU's African and African Diaspora Studies program.

day job, Casablanca edition

I spent last week at the 5th African Perspectives Conference in Casablanca. The conference organizers included ArchiAfrika, whose 2007 conference in Kumasi, Ghana, gave me my first opportunity to discuss Italian colonial architecture and urbanism in a public forum. This conference focused on the issues confronting African mega-cities, which isn't yet a part of my research. However, I was able to present a poster outlining my ongoing work in the Horn of Africa (and which I've expanded into a forthcoming article), and I was honored to be invited to participate in a roundtable discussion on education (my presentation is linked here).