Conversations in Context

Beatriz Colomina + Felicity Scott

Conversations in Context invited leaders from creative fields to reflect on the site’s past, present, and future, and to contribute their perspectives on the Glass House and its significance to contemporary debates.

Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written extensively on questions of architecture and media. Ms. Colomina has taught at Princeton University since 1988, and is the Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University, a graduate program that promotes the interdisciplinary study of forms of culture that came to prominence during the last century and looks at the interplay between culture and technology. In 2006-2007 she curated, with a group of Princeton Ph.D. students, the exhibition “Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X” at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. She has contributed to many volumes, includingThe Banham Lectures, Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change, Beyond Transparency and catalogues of the work of Dan Graham, Muntadas and SANAA, among others. Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1994), Sexuality and Space(New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1992) and Architectureproduction (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1988).  In addition she has published Cold War Hot Houses: Inventing Postwar Culture from Cockpit to Playboy, co-edited with AnnMarie Brennan and Jeannie Kim (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2004; Doble exposición: Arquitectura a través del arte (Double Exposure: Architecture through Art) (Madrid: Akal, 2006), and Domesticity at War (Barcelona: ACTAR and MIT Press, 2007).

Felicity Scott is assistant professor of architecture and director of the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University. She is also a founding co-editor of Grey Room, a quarterly journal of architecture, art, media, and politics published quarterly by MIT Press since Fall 2000. Her work as an architectural historian and theorist focuses on articulating genealogies of political and theoretical engagement with questions of technological transformation within modern and contemporary architecture, as well as within the discourses and institutions that have shaped and defined the discipline. In addition to publishing numerous articles in journals, magazines, and edited anthologies, her book, Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics After Modernism, was published by MIT Press in 2007, and another book, Living Archive 7: Ant Farm, appeared on ACTAR Editorial in May 2008. She has recently completed the manuscript for a book on the Austrian émigré architect Bernard Rudofsky, entitled “Cartographies of Drift: Bernard Rudofsky’s Encounters with Modernity,” and has undertaken substantial research and writing on her subsequent book-project, “Outlaw Territory,” which investigates architecture’s relation to “human unsettlement” and territorial insecurity. She has also written on contemporary art and architecture for magazines including Artforum and Texte zur Kunst as well as in exhibition catalogs. She received her PhD from Princeton University in 2001, and an MAUD from Harvard University in 1994, and is the recipient of many awards, including Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Grant (2011), a New York State Council on the Arts Independent Project Award (2010), a Clark Fellowship (2008), an Arts Writers Grant from Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation (2007), a J. Paul Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship (2002-2003), and a Henry Luce/ACLS Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship in American Art (1998-1999).

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