Symposia
Ross Exo Adams, Tim Anstey, Aleksandr Bierig, Craig Buckley, Jordan H. Carver, Francesco Casetti, Swati Chattopadhyay, David Gissen, Samia Henni, Francesca Hughes, Diana Martinez, Morgan Ng, Alena Beth Rieger, Kishwar Rizvi, David Sadighian, and Mark Wasiuta
Discrepant Circulations
As questions of mobility become more prominent in architectural theory and history it is time to rethink circulation, a term that has long shaped how the field conceptualizes movement. Circulation is more than a synonym for the spaces through which people and things pass; it locates tensions between movement and arrest, passage and capture, flow and containment. What the discipline of architecture calls circulation concerns more than ideals of fluid, elegant, or efficient mobility: it also names operations that organize, differentiate, and channel people and things by means of pathways and diversions, openings and closures. Over the last two decades, adjacent fields such as art history, anthropology, global history, and film and media studies have theorized circulation in a different manner, examining how the meaning of images, signs, knowledge, or commodities are transformed by their currency in global networks. These different theoretical traditions can be brought into productive dialogue to grasp points of complementarity and of friction.
The field might begin by unlearning the habit of treating circulation as a thing, as a discrete aspect of a building’s composition. Yet nor is it sufficient to consider circulation primarily as a metaphor that architects borrowed from medical discourse beginning in the nineteenth century. Critical attention should be paid to what might be called discrepant circulation, those processes that differentiate mobilities by means of social, technical, and aesthetic practices, differences constituted within historically unequal relations of power and knowledge. Some of the questions this symposium hopes to address include: Through what processes have elements like doors, stairs, passages, gates, signals, or screens mediated and differentiated the mobility of humans, non-humans, and more-than-humans? How have conceptions of circulation through buildings and cities been structured by formations of class, race, caste, ability, or gender? In what ways are such structuring formations and cultural techniques legible or illegible in the documents that architectural history calls on? How have concepts of circulation themselves been transformed by changing techniques for the opening and closing of boundaries? How have epistemological categories informed practices that set people, information, and things in motion, or conversely, those that bring them to a halt? How have architects sought to represent circulation and how, in turn, have these techniques shaped architectural thinking?
The symposium, organized by Craig Buckley, aims to refresh and expand attention to concepts of circulation by bringing together a leading group of historians, architects, theorists, and curators to think together about the opportunities and hazards of this pervasive, yet under-examined, concept in the discipline.
Discrepant Circulations has been generously supported by the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund at the Macmillan Center, the History of Art Department, and the School of Architecture. Symposia at the Yale School of Architecture are supported in part by the J. Irwin Miller Fund.
Symposium Schedule
Thursday, March 27th
HASTINGS HALL, Yale School of Architecture
6:30 p.m.
Tim Anstey
“Early Electric: Things That Move in Stockholm” (Keynote)
Friday, March 28th
4TH Floor Pit, Yale School of Architecture
10:00am Craig Buckley
Welcome Words and Introduction
10:20am Ross Exo Adams
“Beyond Movement: Circulation and Worldmaking”
10:40am Swati Chattopadhyay
“The Fluid Landscape of Deltaic Bengal: Toward a Riverine Lexicon”
11:00am Kishwar Rizvi (moderator)
11:20am Alexsandr Bierig
"Dislocations: Architecture versus Infrastructure, 1838/1961”
11:40am Alena Beth Rieger
“Moveables”
12:00pm Morgan Ng (moderator)
1:00pm Mark Wasiuta
“Air Circulation and the Archival Outside”
1:20pm Francesco Casetti
“Enclosures”
1:40pm Tim Anstey (moderator)
2:00pm Diana Martinez
“The Divided Panopticon: Carcerality and Coloniality in the Philippines (1865-1945)”
2:20pm Samia Henni
“The Circulation of Strategic Knowledge”
2:40pm David Sadighian(moderator)
3:20pm Francesca Hughes
“Circulation in the Model”
3:40pm David Gissen
“Circulation Politics and Global Disability Movements, 1965 – 1985”
4:00pm Jordan H. Carver (moderator)
4:30-5:30 Final discussion and Wrap-up