Sat Apr 4th, 2pm @ Room 120:

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“MEMORY LANDSCAPES”_

On Saturday, April 4th, 2015, the Rensselaer Positions Series will host “Memory Landscapes,” with guest speakers Mabel O. Wilson , and Leopoldo Villardi . The presentation will be followed by a round-table discussion.

“Memory Landscapes” poses the following:

How might architecture perform in intensely political situations concerning remembrance and forgetting? Are considerations of memory within built fabrics limited to sites of trauma, or might said regard be part of the larger palette of building typologies and territories architects engage today. How can architecture enable contemporary cultures to articulate meaningful statements about the past? In what ways might the rapid developments surrounding contemporaneous technology and methodologies contribute to a peoples ability to articulate meaningful statements of the past through increasingly advance built work? What new potentialities regarding memory might emerge through these considerations?

About the Participants

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E. Rupp Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Columbia University where she teaches architecture studios, architectural theory, and visual cultural studies. Her seminars examine a range of subjects including raciality and architectural discourse; space and the politics of cultural memory and history; and theories of time, cinema and databases. Her architectural design studios utilize methods of parametric data-mining and visualization to explore urbanization, new technologies, and globalization in African cities and systems of aggregation and material expression. She received a doctorate in American Studies from NYU (2007), and an M. Arch from Columbia’s GSAPP (1991). In addition to her teaching, Wilson serves as the director of GSAPP’s Advanced Architectural Research program, co-directs the Global Africa Lab, and is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Research in African American Studies in GSAS. Her collaborative design practices (KW: a and Studio &) have worked on speculative and built projects.

Wilson’s scholarly research investigates space and cultural memory in black America, race and visual culture, and new technologies and the social production of space. Her recent book Negro Building – Black Americans and the World of Fairs and Museums studies how the spaces of world’s fairs, emancipation expositions, and grassroots public museums became sites to imagine Afro-modernity.

Leopoldo Villardi is an alum of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (’13) where he earned his Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch.) and Bachelor of Science in Philosophy. He is currently a candidate for the Master of Science in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. His thesis research under Professor Felicity D. Scott explores architectural, urban, and environmental tactics of oppression deployed by the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia.

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