Ife Vanable

Ife Salema Vanable is an architect, historian, and theorist who directs i/van/able, a Bronx, NY-founded, Bristol, CT-based (but always Bronx-flavored) architectural workshop and think tank that produces theoretical, speculative, and physical interventions that defy prevailing notions of type, taste, and form. This work has been supported by the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), recognized by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), and exhibited at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale.

Ife holds professional and post-professional degrees in architecture from Cornell and Princeton Universities and has studied at the Architectural Association in London and the University College of Lands and Architectural Studies (now Ardhi University) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Ife was the inaugural KPF Visiting Scholar (2021), as well as a Presidential Visiting Fellow (2022) at Yale SoA. Ife is also a PhD candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). Her scholarly work asks questions of and seeks to unearth complex and seemingly banal relationships between the design of architecture, law, and public policy, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home.

Ife has received numerous awards, prizes, and fellowships, including a History and Theory Prize from Princeton University, a Columbia University Buell Center Fellowship, and an inaugural Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) Prize.

Ife’s writing and musings have been published in the Avery Review, Places Journal, and SSENSE Magazine, and she is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Black Production and the Space of the University. In addition to Yale University’s School of Architecture, Ife has taught at The Cooper Union and Columbia University GSAPP.