Associate Professor Dr. Jason Rebillot was part of a symposium at the University of Pennsylvania entitled, Structural Instabilities: History, Environment and Risk in Architecture. The event was organized by PennDesign’s Daniel Barber, Sophie Hochhäusl, and Eduardo Rega Calvo and featured keynote lectures by Columbia University’s Felicity Scott and Brett Steele, Dean of the School of Arts & Architecture at UCLA. The symposium explored how “the structural instabilities of the 21st century are legible in histories of architecture and related spatio-political disciplines, insofar as they engage questions of economy, gender, race, and environmental change.”
Structural Instabilities: History, Environment and Risk in Architecture
Thursday, April 5, 2018 — Friday, April 6, 2018
Meyerson Hall, 210 South 34th Street Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Rebillot’s talk outlined the framework of a design research workshop on sustainability that was held in the early 1990s, which took place against a global backdrop of significant geopolitical, economic, and technological transformations. The workshop’s guidelines were put forth as demonstrative of both that complexity, and of sustainability’s then-nascent formulations in the fields of architecture, design and urbanism. Ultimately, the initiative represented an urgent attempt to theorize these intersections at a moment when global political actors suddenly turned their attention to the environmental question following the end of the Cold War. The contents of the symposium will be featured in a forthcoming special issue of the journal e-flux.
For more information, see the symposium’s website.