Building Life: Spatial Politics, Science, and Environmental Epistemes

Building Life: Spatial Politics, Science, and Environmental Epistemes is a two-day symposium that examines how entanglements between the interdisciplinary fields of the built environment and the sciences have transformed concepts of nature, territory, and the environment over time, reproducing global inequities that continue to (un)build life. The symposium will feature an array of scholars and practitioners whose work is reshaping our understanding of what it means to inhabit, study, and care for a climate-changed world.

Spanning the fields of art and architectural history, environmental studies, anthropology, sociology, race and ethnicity studies, Indigenous studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and science and technology studies, among others, papers will consider how spatial and scientific practices have historically shaped human interpretations and approaches to life. They will also offer speculative projections to imagine alternative possibilities.

As a collective thought experiment, Building Life proposes that remaking socio-technological systems to repair the planet for collective human and non-human futures requires a critical rethinking of the relations between the interdisciplinary fields of the built environment and science, which serve as world-making institutions continually shaping current practices and understandings of the living.

Convened by Spyros Papapetros (Princeton University) and Esther M. Choi (The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art), Building Life is a Humanities Council Magic Project co-presented by Princeton University and The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment at The Museum of Modern Art. This event is supported by a David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Grant from the Humanities Council at Princeton University.

Please click here to register for either or both days. See full event program and locations on the School of Architecture website.