Inspired by the publication of André Tavares’s new book Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic, the panel discussion “Wet Urbanisms” brings Tavares in conversation with a group of thinkers—interdisciplinary artist Susan Blight, architects Tei Carpenter and Jesse LeCavalier, environmental historian Connie Y. Chiang, digital artist and digital media scholar Nettrice Gaskins, artist Daniel Keller, architectural historian Anna Renken, art historian James Merle Thomas, and architect and researcher Zhi Ray Wang—whose work examines architectural designs and environmental stewardship practices that bridge the marine-terrestrial border.
Wet Urbanisms continues a line of research that the Ambasz Institute began with its exhibition Emerging Ecologies: Architecture and the Rise of Environmentalism, which featured projects by Ant Farm, Carolyn Dry, and Wolf Hilbertz that proposed constructing human and interspecies habitats in aquatic environments. In their marine imaginings, these designers ventured into territory underexplored by the field at large; while over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface is covered by water, scant attention has been paid to the relationship between architecture and its watery surrounds. Join us at Wet Urbanisms, where the invited panelists will shine a light on the many ways—whether it be through neoliberal Seasteading fantasies, underwater Afrofuturist mythologies, public aquariums, or extractive fishing industries—in which architects and others have imagined the relationship between our terrestrial lives and the waters that surround us.
Participants
André Tavares is an architect and founding director of Dafne Editora, an independent publishing house based in Porto. He was editor-in-chief of the magazine Jornal Arquitectos (2013–15) and, with Diogo Seixas Lopes, he was chief co-curator of the 2016 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, The Form of Form. He is the author of The Anatomy of the Architectural Book, L’Étoile Filante Charles Siclis, Álvaro Siza Raw Material, Vitruvius Without Text, and the recently published Architecture Follows Fish: An Amphibious History of the North Atlantic. Currently he is a researcher at the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto, where he is the principal investigator of the project Fishing Architecture, funded through a European Research Council consolidator grant.
Susan Blight (Anishinaabe, Couchiching First Nation) is an interdisciplinary artist working with public art, site-specific intervention, photography, film, and social practice. Her solo and collaborative work engages questions of personal and cultural identity and its relationship to space. Blight is cofounder of Ogimaa Mikana, an artist collective working to reclaim and rename the roads and landmarks of Anishinaabeg territory with Anishinaabemowin, and is a member of the Indigenous Routes artist collective, which works to provide free new-media training for Indigenous youth. She is currently a PhD candidate in social justice education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (UofT), is chair in Indigenous visual culture at OCAD University and an assistant professor in the Faculty of Arts and Science and. Most recently, she joined the Capilano Review as associate editor of the publication’s Indigenous Places and Names series.
Tei Carpenter is founder and director of Agency—Agency, an award-winning architectural design studio that pursues a better world through the transformative potentials of design. Trained in philosophy and architecture, she earned a bachelor’s degree from Brown University, where she was a Royce Fellow, and her MArch degree at Princeton University, where she was awarded the Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship in architecture. Carpenter has lectured internationally and, alongside her practice, has taught at a number of institutions, including Brown University, Columbia University GSAPP, the University of Toronto, and Yale University, where she is currently a critic at the Yale School of Architecture. Born and raised in New York City, Carpenter serves on the board of directors at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
Connie Y. Chiang studies modern United States history, with specialties in environmental history, the history of the American West, social history, and Asian American history. She is particularly interested in how shifting human interactions with and attitudes toward the natural world have transformed American society. She is the author of Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast and has published articles in many journals, including the Journal of American History and Environmental History. Her latest book, Nature Behind Barbed Wire: An Environmental History of the Japanese American Incarceration, explores how the environment shaped the confinement of over 110,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II.
Dr. Nettrice R. Gaskins is an African American digital artist, academic, cultural critic, and advocate of STEAM fields. In her work she explores “techno-vernacular creativity” and Afrofuturism. Dr. Gaskins teaches, writes, “fabs,” and makes art using algorithms and machine learning. She has taught multimedia, visual art, and computer science with high school students. Currently, Dr. Gaskins is the assistant director of the Lesley STEAM Learning Lab at Lesley University. She is an advisory board member for the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Her first full-length book, Techno-Vernacular Creativity and Innovation, is currently available, and her AI-generated artworks can be viewed in journals, magazines, museums, and on the Web.
Daniel Keller is an American artist, writer, and filmmaker whose wide-ranging output engages with issues at the intersection of politics, economics, technology, culture, and collaboration. He is a contributor to New Models, Texte Zur Kunst, DIS, and Spike Art. His work has been exhibited at the New Museum, NYC; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Fridericianum, Kassel; the Athens Biennale; KW, Berlin; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. In 2018, Keller cofounded the podcast and website newmodels.io with arts journalist Caroline Busta and film director and audio producer Lil Internet.
Jesse LeCavalier uses the tools of urban design and architecture to research, theorize, and speculate about infrastructure and logistics. He is the author of The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfillment, and his design work has been recognized by the Sudbury 2050 urban design competition, the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, the Oslo Triennale, and the Seoul Biennale. His work has appeared in Cabinet, Public Culture, Places, Art Papers, Thresholds, and Harvard Design Magazine. LeCavalier is associate professor of architecture at the Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, where he directs the NYC-based master of science in advanced urban design (MSAUD) program.
Anna Renken is a PhD candidate in architecture, landscape, and design at the Daniels Faculty, with a collaborative specialization in environmental studies. Her research explores concepts of nature and approaches to the environment in the design fields since the mid-20th century. In particular, she is interested in tracking how designers have engaged with science and technology through their use of material and representational techniques. She has worked on curatorial and editorial projects at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Walker Art Center, and Log, and her writing has been included in associated publications as well as Drawing Matter, Places, and Pidgin.
James Merle Thomas is a scholar, curator, and executive currently serving as the inaugural deputy director at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation. Prior to joining the Frankenthaler Foundation, Thomas served as the executive director of the Resnick Center for Herbert Bayer Studies at the Aspen Institute, and as assistant professor of art history at Temple University. Thomas served as part of the core curatorial and editorial team responsible for the 2nd Seville Biennial (2006), the 7th Gwangju Biennale (2008), and the Third Paris Triennale (2012). His creative projects encompass large-scale exhibitions and creative projects, academic anthologies, and scholarly and general writing about art, technology, and media of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Zhi Ray Wang is a researcher, architect, and teaching assistant based at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). With a background in architecture and a focus on human-centred research, Ray explores the intersections of urbanism, technology, and sustainability. He is a dual-master candidate for the master of science in architecture studies (SMArchS) in urbanism and electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) at MIT. Before joining MIT, he was a registered architect and interior designer from Taiwan. He is a founder of WZR, a multidisciplinary practice based in Boston and Taipei that believes architecture to be a mixed form of cultural operation and advanced technology. WZR works at a variety of scales and contexts, ranging from art to architecture and urbanism.