About the Event
Lydia Kallipoliti, assistant professor, The Cooper Union, New York; principal ANAcycle thinktank, presents the lecture “Bubble Problems: An Archeology of Infection and Environmental Control” on Wednesday, March 24 at 12:00 p.m. via Zoom as part of the Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series.
With new protocols of decontamination becoming part of daily life, the pandemic has fundamentally transformed our correlation in space by instituting new contracts of entry and departure, comparative proximity, and sense of orientation. These contracts assemble new mappings relative to the constitution of micro-ecologies and the movement of bodies in space diffusing pathogens. In this talk, I will investigate architectures of containment, compulsive confinement, absurdity and hysteria in order to find new ways to fathom architectural legacies of interiorization, climatic control, and fear of infection.
Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics. She is an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York. Previously, she taught at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where she directed the Master of Science Program, at Syracuse University, Columbia University [GSAPP] and Pratt Institute; she was also a visiting fellow at the University of Queensland and a visiting professor at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.
Her work has been published and exhibited widely including the Venice Biennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, the Oslo Architecture Trienalle, the Onassis Cultural Center, the Royal Academy of British Architects, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the London Design Museum. She is the author of the awarded book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018), the History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science and the editor of EcoRedux, a special issue of Architectural Design magazine (AD, 2010). Kallipoliti holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, a Master of Science [SMArchS] in design and building technology from MIT and a PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University. She is the principal of ANAcycle thinktank, which has been named a leading innovator in sustainable design in Build’s 2019 and 2020 awards. Kallipoliti is Head Co-Curator of the upcoming Tallinn Architecture Biennale in 2022 with the theme “Edible, Or, The Architecture of Metabolism.”
The Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series, “New Proximities,” is a collective reckoning of health as a social, political, and fundamentally spatial condition. The global pandemic has not only produced profound shifts in the built environment, but also revealed latent precarities embedded in forms of governance, labor, domesticity, and ecology. This lecture series asks: How does COVID-19 and its compounding crises render visible the uneven geographies in which we operate? How might we reformat existing systems beyond the confining world of pandemic space? Expanding scales and spaces of architectural agency, we will hear from critical voices in design, history, and theory to imagine new futures of care and proximity.
All lectures are free and open to the public. Please be sure to register online for each lecture to receive the link to join. For more information on all lectures and to register to attend, visit arch.rice.edu/latest/events and ricedesignalliance.org.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund, the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series for Students in Architecture, and the William B. Coleman, Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture.
All spring 2021 lectures are eligible for one AIA/CES Learning Unit. Rice Design Alliance is an AIA/CES Registered Provider of quality educational programs.
