Global HTC: A 50th Anniversary Celebration On October 3–4, MIT faculty leadership joined the Architecture community to celebrate the 50th anniversary of MIT’s renowned History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture (HTC) program—a landmark event that brought together scholars, alumni/ae, and thinkers from around the world.
President Sally Kornbluth, Executive Vice Provost Paula Hammond, and SA+P Dean Hashim Sarkis highlighted the enduring significance of the program after five decades. Established in 1975, HTC was the first doctoral program in the history of art and architecture to be embedded within a department of architecture rather than a school of humanities.
Schedule of Panels and Participants
https://sites.mit.edu/htc50/schedule/
Congratulations to Chelsea Spencer (HTC PhD ‘24) on her appointment as the 2025–27 Buell Research and Teaching Fellow at Columbia University!
While at the Buell, Chelsea will work on her current book project, The Contract, the Contractor, and the Capitalization of American Building. This work, which builds on Chelsea's dissertation, tells the story of how building became contracting in the United States during the nineteenth century’s “age of contract.” It shows how contractors dismantled the world of craft building and reconstituted it as the modern construction industry, thus laying the foundations of modern American architecture. Operating at the critical inflection point between projection and materialization, paper and concrete, contractors offered their investment-minded clients what neither craft builders nor professional architects could deliver: a completed building, for a fixed price, on a guaranteed schedule. Unearthing the ideological and institutional foundations of today’s construction industry, the study reveals how nineteenth-century thinking about freedom, value, and risk shaped the architectural building contract and the relationship between architecture and building in the modern world.
Join us this Thursday for our fourth and final HTC Forum lecture of the semester! Alison J. Clarke (Professor of Design History and Theory, University of Applied Arts Vienna) presents “Architectural Damage & Creative Engineering: Interventions in Cold War Design and Development” on April 17 at 6pm.
ABSTRACT: When in the late 1960s a radical pan-Scandinavian design movement initiated a full-blown attack on the ‘architectural damage’ wrought by Modernist welfare architects, their localized grassroots activism appeared far removed from the formal machinations of Cold War geopolitics. Yet the influential environmental design discourse they helped promulgate was inextricably tied to the U.S. government-sponsored transdisciplinary experiments in industrial design, engineering and social science that had sprung up in institutes across the U.S., from MIT to Purdue University. As the influential post-development anthropologist Arturo Escobar has argued, design acted as a crucial (yet routinely overlooked) mechanism of Cold War development policy and its discontents. Based on original archival research, this talk explores how a distinct genre of transdisciplinary design became instrumentalized in U.S. development agendas across the Global South, examining its residual legacy in contemporary user-based corporate design practice.
Alison J. Clarke is a design historian and social anthropologist whose research deals with the intersection of these two disciplines, specifically in terms of their shared focus on the politics of material culture and social relations. Her present book project Design Anthropology: Decolonizing and Recolonizing the Material World (MIT Press) explores the blurred historical boundaries between design practice and anthropology as well as the social consequences of the uptake of this melding by the contemporary corporate sector.
Join us next Monday for our third HTC Forum lecture of the semester! Anneka Lenssen (Associate Professor of Global Modern Art, UC Berkeley) presents “Untimely Collaborations: Rabbia Sukkarieh’s Performance Art on Television (Beirut, 1988)” on March 31 at 6pm.
ABSTRACT: Who was the cameraperson for artist Rabbia Sukkarieh’s surviving 26 seconds of video documentation of her performance on the green line in Beirut in 1988, involving convincing snipers along the edge of Khorsh Beirut to hold their fire while the artist wrapped the bullet-riddled trees in green fabrics? No one can recall. The pressures of a civil war and forced economic migration have scattered the moment into other formats of perception. In this talk, I offer an account of my attempt to research Sukkarieh’s performance work in 1988, a time of siege that presages our current ever expanding wars, through the recovery of a few seconds of footage aired on national television – a site of “untimely collaboration” with the thoughts and visions of others. I explore in particular Sukkarieh’s interest in the fugitivity of resistance actions that are spun out to other viewers. “Third World problems sleep between my eyelids,” Sukkarieh wrote in 1988, invoking the discontinuous story-telling of Scheherazade (a feminist hero as well as an Orientalist cliche) as a tactic of survival and a repository of shared experiences of dispossession. In a world constituted by too much documentation of violence, how can artists bear witness? And under what conditions can an art historian participate in this task?
Anneka Lenssen is Associate Professor of Global Modern Art in the Department of History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. She specializes in modern painting and contemporary visual practices, with a focus on the cultural politics of the Middle East.
Join us next Thursday for our second HTC Forum lecture of the semester! Rebecca Choi (Assistant Professor of Architectural History, Tulane University) presents “‘Soul and T-Square’: The Watts Urban Workshop and the Conditions of Black Spatial Agency” on March 6 at 6pm.
ABSTRACT: By reconsidering the Watts Urban Workshop’s architectural proposals for funding from President Johnson’s Model Cities Program, part of his 1964 War on Poverty, this microhistory outlines feasible architectural visions of reparations in 1970s Watts, Los Angeles. While most histories of the War on Poverty consider Johnson’s concept of “maximum feasible participation” as a driving force of self-help programming for poor communities to be more of a gesture than a call, a consideration of the Watts Urban Workshop’s goals to teach self-determination and community participation shows how Black practitioners were thinking about reparative futures in ways that have not been registered by architecture, urban planning, or history.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER: Rebecca Choi is an Assistant Professor of architectural history at Tulane University. Her research considers how movements for racial justice have had a pivotal role in the making of urban America. By focusing on social activism and community organizing as they relate to housing rights, land ownership and the city, her work considers protests, boycotts, sit-ins, and rebellions to be insurgent “hacks” in the ever-changing codes of an anti-Black world.
She is currently working on two book projects. The first, Black Architectures: Race, Pedagogy and Practice, puts oral histories into conversation with architectural archives and brings underexamined Black architectural producers to the surface of 20th-century history. The second, Swamp Life, examines how Black women have challenged the rigid categorization of space as habitable or uninhabitable by reclaiming swamplands as non-binary sites of survival across the Black Atlantic.
Join us tomorrow for the first HTC Forum lecture of the semester! Siobhan Angus presents “Photography from the Deep: Image-Making and Resource Extraction” on Tuesday Feb 18 at 6pm.
ABSTRACT: Challenging the emphasis on immateriality in discourses on photography, this talk focuses on the inextricable links between image-making and resource extraction, revealing how mining is a precondition of photography. Photography begins underground and, in photographs of mines and mining, frequently returns there. Through a materials-driven analysis of visual culture, Angus illustrates histories of colonization, labor, and environmental degradation to explore the ways in which photography is enmeshed within and enables global extractive capitalism. Reading materiality alongside representation and visual form reveals a complex picture of photography’s implication within extractive capitalism and, in turn, its potential to resist it.
ABOUT OUR SPEAKER: Siobhan Angus works at the intersections of art history, media studies, and the environmental humanities. She is an assistant professor of media studies at Carleton University and holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Visual Culture from York University where her dissertation was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal. Prior to joining Carleton, Angus was the Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. She is the author of Camera Geologica: An Elemental History of Photography (Duke University Press, 2024), and her research has been published in Environmental Humanities, Capitalism and the Camera (Verso, 2021) and October. At the heart of her research program lies an intellectual and political commitment to environmental, economic, and social justice.
PHOTO: David Goldblatt, Old mill foundations, tailing wheel and sand dump, Witwatersrand Deep Gold Mine, Germiston, August 1966, 1966. Platinum print on Arches Platine 310gm.
Save these dates! 🌷 HTC Forum is back for the spring semester with four great lectures (and one new poster). Over the break, we worked with MIT’s Morningside Academy of Design to add a final speaker to our spring line-up – we look forward to welcoming Alison J. Clarke (University of Applied Arts Vienna) in April!
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the History, Theory + Criticism program at MIT, so these four special Forum lectures are part of our calendar of celebrations. Our first spring lecture is in exactly one week: on Tues Feb 18, we’re so excited to hear from Siobhan Angus (Carleton University). Stay tuned for another post with more information about our brilliant speaker…
Join us for the next HTC Forum lecture, organized with @mitarchitecture and @mit_lcau !
Sarah Lopez presents “This Transnational Tie is Volcanic: Migrating Materials and the People that Carry Them in Mexico and the US” on Thursday, Nov 14, at 6pm.
“This Transnational Tie is Volcanic” elevates both Mexican laborers and cantera stone as two key protagonists in the production of new architectures and landscape elements on both sides of the US-Mexico border. “Cantera” means quarry but in Mexico and among the migrant community in the US Southwest, cantera is used as a commercial term to describe Mexican tuff, the mottled volcanic rock that built both colonial churches in cities like San Luis Potosí and Pre-Columbian monuments like the Zapotec structures of Mitla. Once reserved for Mexico’s elite, an exploration of cantera today repositions Mexicans and Mexican Americans as key informants in the design and execution of migrant urbanisms in the US defined as both transnational and hyper-local. By tracking the excavation, processing, distribution and commissioning of cantera stone over the last fifty years, Lopez also explores the limits and possibilities of a material-ethnographic-environmental method that situates Mexican quarrymen, artisans, masons, entrepreneurs, and their objects, at the heart of a binational history. Transnational building processes are here key to understanding cantera landscapes, deployed by once-and/or-still marginalized individuals in both Mexico and the US who claim binational futures.
Sarah Lopez is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Lopez is a built environment historian of 20th-century Mexico and the United States whose research focuses on material histories of migration, remittance development and landscapes, and migrant incarceration.
This lecture will be held in person in the Long Lounge (7-429) and streamed online – see the link in our bio for more info and webinar registration. (Photo credit: Eric Sucar.)
Here’s the rest of our lecture program for 2024–25 along with our poster, courtesy of designer Ina Wu (MArch ‘25)!
Ina Wu is a researcher and designer based between Hong Kong and Boston. Her work explores marginalized voices through the lens of architecture, with a particular focus on gender and migration in the urban environment. She delves into the political dimensions of city fiction writing as a tool to reimagine alternative urban narratives and futures. In her design practice, she situates at the intersection of the literary, the graphical, and the physical, exploring how these realms can bridge and expand our understanding of built environments.
A huge thanks to Dr. Maria C. Taylor from Cornell’s department of Landscape Architecture, whose lecture on Soviet urban greening this week kicked off our 2024–25 HTC Forum lecture series.
Stay tuned for more details about our upcoming events!
Join us for our first HTC Forum lecture of the year! Maria C. Taylor presents “From Microclimates to Microraions: Unbundling the Ambitions of Soviet Urban Greening” on Tuesday Oct. 29 at 6pm. See link in bio for details!
Abstract: Urban greenspace was an infrastructure of Soviet modernity. This talk examines the confluence of politics, plants, and place in the USSR, analyzing Soviet urbanists’ management of industrial pollution, everyday environments, and urban forests from the 1930s era of rapid industrialization to the late 20th-century emergence of a mass environmental movement. It draws from Taylor’s current book project, Between Forest and Factory, identifying the urban roots of Soviet environmentality in relation to garden-factories, microdistricts, cities “melting into greenery” and other typologies of socialist urbanism. By bringing insights from ecocriticism and materiality studies into conversation with urban landscapes from Tbilisi to Tashkent, this work contributes to interdisciplinary scholarship about non-Western environmentality, the transnational history of urban climatology, and 20th-century attitudes toward nature and ecology. Urban greening efforts enrolled both professionals and populace in the shaping of distinctively socialist ambitions. Building cities that were “hygienic, cultured and green” meant adapting standardized planting schemes to an immense range of climates and conditions. Abundant greenery was expected to ameliorate industrial living conditions, provide a communal amenity and index differences vis-à-vis capitalist urbanism and consumption. Eventually, when the trees intended to mitigate industrial hazards perished, so did the state-socialist political project of civic engineering.
Maria C. Taylor is a historian and theorist of urban and landscape design, with regional expertise in Eastern Europe, Siberia, and Soviet Central Asia. She is currently an Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture (College of Agriculture and Life Sciences) at Cornell University.
