Keynote Speakers

[November 17] Roundtable

CHRISTOPHE HUTIN // Christophe Hutin Architecture/ Associate Professor of Architecture, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Bordeaux; general curator of the French pavilion at the 2021 Architectural Biennial in Venice

PASCALE JOFFROY // Associate Professor of Architecture, Ecole d’Architecture de la ville & des territoires Paris-Est / Co-founder of the Système B, comme bidonville association

NANCY OTTAVIANO // Architect, PhD in Urban planning/ Co-director of Quatorze association and of Quidam Architectes (SCOP)

XAVIER WRONA // Associate Professor of Architecture, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Saint-Etienne/ ENS Ulm, Centre Jean Pépin/ Founder of the architecture office Est-ce ainsi (2006-2018)/ Administrator of the Après la revolution association

[November 18]

FELICITY SCOTT // Professor of Architecture/ Director of the PhD program in Architecture (History and Theory)/ Co-director of the program in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (CCCP) at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University.

“New Rules of the Game”

My talk will recover Resource One, an “alternative” computer resource center founded in conjunction with Project One, an urban commune housed in an obsolescent industrial building in San Francisco in 1971, and celebrated by Stewart Brand as a “counter-computer” initiative in his 1972 Rolling Stone article “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums.”  If the “alternative” lifestyles being forged within this refunctioned factory appeared at the time to transgress normative forms of life and of subjectivity, when read through the lens of contemporaneous capitalist mutations a more complex relation to dominant techniques of power emerges into visibility. t is this question of how architecture relates to emergent, less linear ordering systems and their social, technical, and economic protocols that my talk hopes to address, asking how “space” contributed to an updated conditioning mechanism in the service of those scripting the new “rules of the game,” opposition to which became increasingly elusive at this historical moment.

[November 19] 

ACHILLE MBEMBE // Historian, philosopher, political theorist/ member of the staff at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg (South Africa)/ annual visiting appointment at the Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University (United States)