“Blurred Visions: Architectures of Surveillance from Mies to SANAA”
Business Building, Room 903, Beirut campus
The lecture will be given by Beatriz Colomina.
Abstract:
The history of the modern window is a history of communication: Le Corbusier’s horizontal window is unthinkable outside of cinema, the Eames House is unthinkable outside of the color slide, and the picture window at midcentury is unthinkable outside of television. In each case, the ambition of modern architecture to dissolve the line between inside and outside is realized by absorbing the latest realities of communication. Today, new forms of advanced surveillance technologies operate in the city, and these models of vision act as new paradigms. The glass box has become something else altogether.
About the presenter:
Beatriz Colomina was born in Madrid and studied architecture in the Escuela Tecnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona. She came to New York at the end of 1980 and was a Visiting Fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and at Columbia University. She has taught at the ETSAB, Columbia University and MIT. Currently she is Professor of Architecture, Director of the Ph.D. program in architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.
Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), which was awarded the 1995 International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects, and has been translated into seven languages; Sexuality and Space, published by Princeton Architectural Press in 1992 and awarded an International Book Award by the American Institute of Architects in 1993; and Domesticity at War (MIT and ACTAR, 2007).
Recently she curated 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 CCA in Montreal. The exhibition traveled to Documenta 12, the Architectural Association in London, Norsk Form in Oslo, the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver, the Disseny Hub Barcelona, the Colegio de Arquitectos de Murcia (Spain) and the NAI Maastricht/Bureau Europe in Maastricht. The catalogue of the exhibition, Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X, has just been published by ACTAR. Her next research project is “X-Ray Architecture: Illness as Metaphor.”
Event organizer: LAU’s School of Architecture and Design – Department of Architecture and Interior Design