CRUNCH: Transscalar Architecture

The politics of architecture are enacted as it transitions across scales. Every architecture is bodied, as every architecture is breathed, sweated, swallowed, fluxed, digested, environmentalised, and climatised. Architecture is a body-environmental practice. Architecture is a body-environmental being. It is not about space; it is compositional, fleshy-compositional and environmental-compositional. Ultimately, architecture is cosmopolitics.  

Professor Andrés Jaque will discuss his work exploring the ideas of reciprocal landscapes reflecting on his exhibit at the Venice Biennale 2023. This project, Dangerous Liaisons, investigated how New York’s high-end architecture is produced from distant materials, bodies and knowledge. These are extracted from their local ecosystems to become resources; commodities circulating in a contemporary economy based on global accumulation. Connecting to the series annual theme ‘to resource’ in the context of extraction and exploitation.  

This discussion will be chaired by Director of The Bartlett School of Architecture, Amy Kulper, with a response from Guang Yu Ren, Director of History & Theory, The Bartlett School of Architecture.  

This event is part of the inaugural CRUNCH Series at The Bartlett School of Architecture, replacing the International Lecture Series. Please note this event is first-come, first-served and is limited capacity. 

Speaker Biographies

Andrés Jaque is Dean and Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and founder of Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN), based in New York and Madrid. As an architect, researcher and curator, his practice explores architecture as an entanglement of bodies, technologies, and environment. His work approaches materiality as relational, trans-scalar, and intrinsically political. Professor Jaque is the recipient of the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts (2016), the Silver Lion 14th Venice Architecture Biennale (2014) and the Dionisio Hernández Gil Prize (2001–2006), among other recognitions. 

Amy Catania Kulper is an architect, theorist, and curator whose teaching and research focus on the intersections of history, theory, and criticism with design. In September 2022, she joined The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, as Professor of Architecture and Director of the School. Previously, she was Department Head at RISD (the Rhode Island School of Design) where she was actively engaged in the project of making architectural pedagogy and practice more accessible, inclusive, and equitable. Kulper’s writings are published in Log, The Journal of Architecture, arq: Architectural Research Quarterly, Candide, The Journal of Architectural Education, and numerous edited volumes. Kulper has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education where she has acted as the Design Editor for six years, receiving the ACSA Distinguished Service Award for her work on the journal. 

Guang Yu Ren is Director of History and Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.  Over the past two decades she has worked collaboratively with institutions and practitioners on various research and heritage projects in Asia, Africa, and Europe, centred around the experiences of modernity outside the Western canon and the inequity of architectural historiography.     

In 2017 Guang Yu was awarded the RIBA President’s Medal for Research for her work on the architecture and urban planning in Japan’s imperial territory of northeast China, Manchuria. She also collaborated on the successful UNESCO World Heritage Nomination of the modernist city of Asmara, Eritrea, where she has worked since 2001. The Asmara project was also awarded the RIBA President’s Medal for Research in 2016. Most recently her work has been focusing on the historical and paradoxical relationships between modern heritage, power, and the Anthropocene. 

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Image: Jose Hevia Blach, Offpolinn