NB: because entrance to campus currently requires a Columbia ID, please reach out to Zachary Torres ([email protected]) by Friday April 24, if you require guest access to this event. Due to campus restrictions we are unable to honor last-minute requests.
The architecture of the Arts and Crafts is frequently associated with the “honest” use of “natural materials.” Yet paradoxically only rarely have historians scrutinized the “natural” origins of its constitutive materials. What would it mean to think of this turn-of-the century architecture, so often celebrated for its closeness to nature, as an architecture of extraction, to look beyond the Arts and Crafts movement’s rhetorical expression of rawness and refinement, and engage in a more through accounting of its ecological origins, debts, and entanglements? This talk, drawn from a manuscript-in-progress about the political ecology of Arts and Crafts architecture, traces the asbestos tiles in Bernard Maybeck’s celebrated First Church of Christ Scientist from the mine to its as-yet-undetermined future. It interrogates asbestos’s rapid transformation over the course of the twentieth century from a “miracle mineral” to ubiquitous toxicant. Examining Maybeck’s embrace of this new material offers an opportunity to consider how architects at the turn of the century negotiated what Lewis Mumford termed the “paleotechnic era” and its environmental consequences.
Irene Cheng is an associate professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. An architectural historian and critic, her research explores the entanglements of architecture, culture, environment, and politics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Cheng is author of The Shape of Utopia: The Architecture of Radical Reform in Nineteenth-Century America (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), and co-editor of Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (University of Pittsburgh, 2020) and The State of Architecture at the Beginning of the 21st Century (Monacelli Press, 2003). She is currently working on a book that explores the political ecology of Arts and Crafts architecture, as well as a related collaborative project called the Materialities of Empire.
