Urban Salon: Imaging Collapse - The Aesthetics of Economic Downfall

Mireille Roddier (Associate Professor, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan) will give a seminar on "Imaging Collapse: The Aesthetics of Economic Downfall", chaired by Pushpa Arabindoo (Co-director, UCL Urban Laboratory) with Louis Moreno as discussant.

Drawing from Roddier's proposed book project, Imaging Collapse is interested in expanding the lens through which extreme instances of urban blight and fis­cal ill-being are portrayed, and to borrow from interdisciplinary theoretical frameworks in order to make sense of the ramifications of such accounts on contemporary architectural production outside of the claims generated from within the discipline. In particular, four interdependent aspects of this production are worth probing: its reliance upon, contribution to, and naturaliza­tion of post-industrial ruin imagery understood through aesthetic and affect theories; its relationship to the relational aesthetics discourse coming from the art world; its capitalization by cultural institutions and the logics of curation, cultural power and recuperation; and its alleged role in creative class urban gentrification in light of the financing of architecture in an era of economic decline.

While the focus of the work is not limited to Detroit, the city serves as a case study for many of its parts. It analyses and reveals the complications in much of the architectural work currently emerging out of socio-economically deprived urban contexts in the service of further produc­tion by asking: how do we negotiate the creation of architectural artifacts that are either intended for, or recuperated by, the cultural establishment, in a context marked by social violence on the general public.

There will be drinks and chat after the discussion.