NB: because entrance to campus currently requires a Columbia ID, please reach out to Zachary Torres ([email protected]) by Monday, March 23 if you require guest access to this event. Due to campus restrictions we are unable to honor last-minute requests.
From 1817 to 1825, New York State commissioned thousands to build the Erie Canal, which spanned 363 horizontal miles and over 500 vertical feet, linking Albany to Buffalo. Upon completion, this infrastructure opened a navigable waterway between the western territory of the state and the Hudson River. This lecture will show how managing the canal’s construction stitched the transactional work of commerce to the state’s right to govern the land. Analogous to Manhattan’s grid, and planned by many of the same commissioners, the waterway transformed its surroundings into a territory for speculation, involving investors, contract laborers, native people, and political leaders. The paper considers the history of the canal’s construction by following its tabulated accounts, and it interprets the iconography of its opening ceremony through a series of symbolic artifacts to show how the organizers bound capital to nature in a material, literary, and visual event.
Michael Osman’s research in architectural history focuses on the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular emphasis on buildings and cities in the United States. He seeks connections between the infrastructure that undergirds the processes of modernization and the historiography of modernist architecture. Osman is the author of Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a book on the role buildings have played in developing systems for environmental and economic regulation. With the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, he co-edited the volume Writing Architectural History: Evidence and Narrative in the Twenty-First Century (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021). He currently directs UCLA's MA and PhD programs in the Critical Studies of Architecture.
