College Events / Special Events
Geologic Turn Symposium
The Geologic Turn: Architecture's New Alliance
A Symposium Curated by Etienne Turpin, Taubman College 2011-2012 Walter B. Sanders Fellow
Jan. 10 and Feb. 10-11, 2012
Taubman College, A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104)
Recent research and practice in the fields of architecture, art, and philosophy suggest the increasing influence of geology with the design disciplines, visual arts, and theoretical humanities. The symposium A Geologic Turn: Architecture's New Alliance, curated by Etienne Turpin, Ph.D., as part of the Sanders Research Fellowship at the Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning, University of Michigan, bring together researchers, scholars, and practitioners whose work is at the center of this fecund transdisciplinary trajectory. The objectives of the symposium are to encourage new productive connections among current scholarship and practice, and to expose this new transdisciplanary research to Taubman College for discussion and debate.
The symposium is generously supported by the Sanders Fellowship at Taubman College and the Institute for the Humanities of the University of Michigan. All events are free and open to the public; for more information visit ANEXACT.org.
Click here to watch the rest of the presentations.
Schedule
Friday, February 10, 2012
| Taubman College, A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104) | |
| 6:00 PM |
Keynote: Stan Allen, Princeton University School of Architecture Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain |
| 6 – 8PM |
SIGNAL-RETURN Books + Prints We are very lucky to have Maia Asshaq of Signal-Return joining us at TCAUP with a table of selected books and publications by our symposium speakers, as well as the latest books and artist projects from Signal-Return, and the most delicious and original poster prints in the Middle West. If you are in Detroit's Eastern Market, please stop in for a visit to their beautiful new print shop. And, make sure to visit Maia and S-R during the Geologic Turn symposium, next to the A+A Auditorium. |
Saturday, February 11, 2012
| Taubman College, A+A Auditorium (Rm 2104) | |
| 10:00 AM |
IMMANENT HISTORIES Seth Denizen, University of Virginia (MLA candidate) Jane Hutton, Harvard University Graduate School of Design Amy Catania Kulper, University of Michigan Taubman College w/ Meredith Miller, University of Michigan Taubman College Documenting a series of erratic boulders that were first deposited at the toes of the retreating Late-Wisconsin ice sheets, Harvard GSD Assistant Professor Jane Hutton will consider the role of glacially distributed rocks in instigating popular conceptions about the continuum between human and geological action; Seth Denizen, currently Master of Landscape Architecture candidate at the University of Virginia where his thesis research studying the anthropogenic soils of New York City and their disturbing taxonomies, will then consider the temporal and aesthetic dimensions that made modern geology empirically sensible and suggest a correlative proposal for the Anthropocene; and, Taubman College Assistant Professor Amy Kulper will discuss research from her current book project Immanent Natures: The Laboratory as Paradigm for Architecture's Experimental Practices, and consider the geologic in the writings of Viollet, Semper, and Ruskin. The panel, moderated by Taubman College Assistant Professor Meredith Miller of milligram office, seeks to track the geologic turn as a long and immanent history within which design research explores the precarity of its own foundations. |
| 11:30 AM |
MAKING THE GEOLOGIC NOW Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth, smudge studio w/ Rosalyne Shieh, University of Michigan Taubman College In this session, smudge studio collaborators Jamie Kruse and Elizabeth Ellsworth will announce early sightings of an emergent and expanding cultural sensibility: the increasingly widespread turn toward the geologic as source of explanation, motivation, and inspiration for understanding and responding to conditions of the present moment. Recent natural and human-made events triggered by or triggering the geologic have made volatile earth forces sense-able and relevant with new levels of intensity. Artists, designers, architects, and cultural producers have begun to explore and creatively respond to the geologic depth of "now." smudge will trace some of these developments, and present their own work as a test site for what might become thinkable or possible if we humans were to collectively take up the geologic as our instructive co-designer – as our partner in designing thoughts, objects, systems, and experiences. The panel will be moderated by Taubman College Assistant Professor Rosalyne Shieh, founding principle of SCHAUM/SHIEH. |
| 1:00 PM | LUNCH |
| 2:30 PM |
HARD AND SOFT EVIDENCE D. Graham Burnett, Princeton University Department of History Edward Eigen, The City College of New York Spitzer School of Architecture Paulo Tavares, Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture w/ Rania Ghosn, University of Michigan Taubman College Professor Edward Eigen, who is currently preparing to publish An Anomalous Plan, which discusses the development of laboratory spaces in nineteenth-century France will begin with a discussion of the false bottom of historical geology; Paulo Tavares, an architect and urbanist from Brazil, will consider how, as the Earth enters the legal arena, the scientific and documentary techniques employed to mediate its testimony appear as sites through which the construction of historical-political narratives are disputed; D. Graham Burnett, historian of science and editor of Cabinet magazine, will then consider, in response to these presentations, the epistemological horizon as it is apportioned between scientific investigation and design research. This panel will be moderated by Taubman College's Assistant Professor Rania Ghosn, whose research on Landscapes of Energy can be found in the journal New Geographies. |
| 10AM – 4PM | SIGNAL-RETURN Books + Prints |
Contributors
With publications such as Smudge Studio's Geologic City: a field guide to the GeoArchitecture of New York, and their forthcoming edited collection Making a Geologic Turn, as well as Stan Allen and Marc McQuade's edited collection Landform Building: Architecture's New Terrain, and Peter Galison's forthcoming Building Crashing Thinking, it is clear that a productive new alliance among geological research, the visual arts, science and technology studies, and the design disciplines is under construction. The symposium aims to clarify three lines that inform this geological alliance: historical scholarship, theoretical inquiry, and contemporary practice. Of course, these three lines are sometimes quite productively tangled, and the symposium participants have all been invited for their unique abilities to entangle research, theory and practice, and thereby produce important hybrid models for contemporary scholarship.
In order to avoid the false claims of novelty, the relations among architecture, landscape, and geology will be discussed in their historical context (Jane Hutton, Seth Denizen, Amy Kulper, Meredith Miller). The theoretical component of current affinities between science and design research, and their potential relation to the Anthropocene, will comprise a second line of discussion (Edward Eigen, D. Graham Burnett, Paulo Tavares, Rania Ghosn). The third line of inquiry regarding contemporary practice would take up geologic commitments through a discussion of current practices in architecture and landscape architecture (Stan Allen), the visual arts and cultural production (Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse of smudge studio), and the history of science (Peter Galison).
Anthropocene
In 2002, the chemist Paul Crutzen coyly suggested to a group of fellow scientists that our current geological epoch should be renamed the Anthropocene to reflect the decisive impact humans have on their environment, including its geological features. Following Crutzen's comments and a paper published the same year in the journal Nature, the Anthropocene began to circulate within hydrospheric, biospheric, and pedospheric research and their attendant scientific publications. However, it was not until 2007, when the British stratigrapher, Jan Zalasiewicz, then serving as the chairman of the Geological Society of London's Stratigraphy Commission, asked his colleagues about the merit of the term that it began to register as a formal geological question. While the International Commission on Stratigraphy and the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) continue to debate the relevant scientific merits of this diachronic shift, in the visual arts, theoretical humanities, and architecture and landscape architecture we have witnessed a turn to the geologic.
Past Events
Tuesday, January 10, 6:00 PM
Geologic Turn Opening Lecture – WASTELANDS AND WILDERNESS
Peter Galison (Harvard University)
