BOOK TALK WITH CO-EDITORS MONA EL KHAFIF AND SETH MCDOWELL, MODERATED BY ILA BERMAN 

REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT

FOLLOWED BY A BOOK-SIGNING & RECEPTION
Celebrate the release of the School of Architecture’s newest title in its Next Cities series, Next New York—co-edited by Associate Professors Mona El Khafif and Seth McDowell—in the city that inspired its making. Join a conversation with the editors; Ila Berman, Elwood R. Quesada Professor and Director, Next Cities Institute will introduce and moderate the program. 

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Next New York (ORO AR+D, spring 2023) captures the city’s current momentum through the lens of three important urban actions: sharing, connecting, and partnering. Through 10 essays from scholars and practitioners working on pressing urban issues, a photographic essay portraying New York during COVID-19, and more than 35 design projects from graduate studios at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, Next New York reflects, comments, and speculates on New York City’s capacity to bring about new conceptions of city-making and collective cohabitation through architecture. Pre-order a copy of this book through the link below and pick it up at the event. 

PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY OF THIS BOOK

UVA in Prague: Threshold of European Art and Culture 

In this course, students will learn the visual and cultural history of Prague and the Czech Republic, one of the most important Central European sites, and former seat of the Holy Roman Empire. At the intersection of eastern and western cultural roots and traditions, the art history of Prague from its earliest Romanesque roots to the fall of Communism and even current contemporary artistic exploration following the Velvet Revolution of 1989, constitutes a unique lens through which to explore all periods of European art and culture. This course focuses upon early and medieval traditions in week one and then continues with Renaissance, Baroque, fin-de-siècle, Communist, and independent Czech traditions in week two. Daily explorations of art historical topics are complemented by local lectures on culture, language, literature, and politics from the local Czech staff at Park Lane International School.

Kathryn Grossman, Department of Sociology & Anthropology, North Carolina State University

In recent years, archaeologists have shied their aenon away from animals as passive parcipants in their own fate, and focused instead on animals as constuve members of mulspecies sociees. The intertwined lives of humans, animals, things, and divinies come together dramacally in the case of religious sacrifice, where boundaries between worlds are broken down and rebuilt through ritual, death, and consumpon. In a new project undertaken in collaboraon with Erin Avere (Creighton Univ.) and David Reese (Yale), we consider the fates of people and animals as together they pracce religious sacrifice in Cyprus in the Late Bronze and Iron Age. Cypriot religious and ritual iconography is rife with animal imagery, in vove offerings, depicons of deies, and zoomorphic masks, suggesng a broad role for animals in Cypriot religious life. This project considers animal remains from sanctuaries across Cyprus, along with art historical and archaeological evidence, and highlights the ways in which animals contributed to world-building (through the negoaon of earthly, liminal, and divine realms) and knowledge-creaon (through prognoscaon and divinaon).

BOOK TALK WITH AUTHOR LAURA J. MARTIN, MODERATED BY BRADLEY CANTRELL + ELIZABETH MEYER

FOLLOWED BY A BOOK-SIGNING + RECEPTION

Restorationists grapple with the deepest puzzles of human care for life on earth: How to intervene in nature for nature’s own sake? What are the natural baselines that humans should aim to restore? Is it possible to design nature without destroying wildness? Laura J. Martin shows how amateur and professional ecologists, interest groups, and government agencies coalesced around a mode of environmental management that sought to respect the world-making, and even the decision-making, of other species. At the same time, restoration science reshaped material environments in ways that transformed what we understand the wild to be. 

In Wild by Design, restoration’s past provides vital knowledge for climate change policy. But Martin also offers something more―a meditation on what it means to be wild and a call for ecological restoration that is socially just.

Wild by Design is the recipient of a 2023 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize, presented by the UVA Center for Cultural Landscapes' Landscape Studies Initiative for its significant contributions to landscape studies.

POSTERS FROM THE FRONT LINES OF THE CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT, 1968–2022
__________

EXHIBITION
FRI, SEPT 22 – SUN, OCT 29
CAMPBELL ELMALEH GALLERY
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POSTER WORKSHOP
MON, OCT 23, 5PM
CAMPBELL ELMALEH GALLERY

Like the Waters We Rise is a collection of culture, ephemera, and history charting early and recent waves in climate justice organizing, from 1968–2022. 

The scale of the climate crisis we are collectively facing is daunting. This collection of 23 posters and banners offers a portal to an inspiration, a victory, or a teaching about how people-powered action is the most viable strategy we have for building the future. Each screenprint provides viewers with an understanding of climate justice as a rich, intersectional movement of movements driven by a multitude of visions for a better world. Together, they are a call to action. 

Like The Waters We Rise was created as part of a larger exhibition and event series developed with both the Nathan Cummings Foundation (New York City) and Interference Archive (Brooklyn) in 2019–2020. The box set—recently acquired by the School of Architecture—was created in 2022 in collaboration with Booklyn, Inc., an artist-run non-profit that archives and distributes the work of artists and social justice groups, and organized by curator Raquel de Anda and artist-activist Josh MacPhee. 

Get inspired by this collection of climate justice posters, then make your own with Assistant Professor Jennifer Lawrence, whose work unveils the structures of environmental injustice through creative artistic forms. 

We invite parents and families of our A-School students to join us at Campbell Hall to kick off Family Weekend (11.3– 11.5) with the School of Architecture. Meet Dean Malo A. Hutson, faculty, staff and student ambassadors, and participate in hands-on activities, career-focused programming, and student-guided tours. Light food provided. 

More details about the University's full weekend can be found here. 

Please note, the University is requesting registration for Family Weekend 2023 by October 8th, 2023. 

In 1994, the Hungarian-born architectural photographer Balthazar Korab was contacted by a Protocol Officer in Washington, D.C., and asked to send a selection of forty prints to the U.S. State Department, twelve of which would be personally selected by President William J. Clinton as a state gift to Árpád Göncz, the then-president of Hungary. The criteria spelled out by the State Department for the selection of the gift was rather straightforward: “A creative work by an American that contains a definitive link to Hungary.”  

Korab titled his selection, “The Mark of Man on the Land,” and chose images that reflected “the extraordinary urban development in the United States, which has occurred largely at the expense of rural life.” The set of images, on view as part of the exhibition Balthazar Korab: Portrait of a Nation, represent a broad spectrum of cultural expressions that range from America’s agrarian foundations to its urban and industrial growth. Examined more closely, however, and the images reveal a much more complex, if not complicated, narrative about America through an immigrant's lens.

Join the School of Architecture's John Comazzi, author of Balthazar Korab: Architect of Photography, for a gallery talk on Friday, November 10, at 12 pm in the Elmaleh Gallery.

The detached single-family home is synonymous with the American Dream. Although popularly associated with suburbs, single-family houses are also the basic building block of most U.S. cities and dominate their urban form. Join urban design and housing expert, Dr. Vinit Mukhija for a talk focused on how single-family housing neighborhoods are slowly but significantly changing through informal and unpermitted modifications by homeowners, in opposition to long-held norms and standards. Mukhija cites case studies in Los Angeles, Santa Cruz, Seattle, Portland, Minneapolis, and Vancouver to examine how homeowners’ economic interests are changing the rules of single-family living, while outlining the need for inclusive planning and public policies to expand the idea of housing as a social dream. 

Mukhija's research draws from Global South-dominated informal economy literature on informal settlements and housing to understand how homeowners change their single-family homes without permits and how they avoid enforcement action from local governments. He uses the Global South as an analytical framework to focus on less advantaged groups, their linkages with the market economy, struggles with market-based housing policies, and their responses of survival and resistance.  Through his scholarship, Mukhija challenges emerging conventional ideas in U.S. urban planning.

Publications authored or edited by Vinit Mukhija (l–r) Just Urban Design: The Struggle for a Public City (MIT Press, 2022, co-edited with Kian Goh and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris); Remaking the American Dream: The Informal and Formal Transformation of Single-Family Housing Cities (MIT Press, 2022); The Informal American City: Beyond Taco Trucks and Day Labor (MIT Press, 2014, co-edited with Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris).

August 12 - December 3, 2023 • 10am-4pm • Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection

Three Women from Wirrimanu explores the remarkable painting practices of Aboriginal artists Eubena Nampitjin, Muntja Nungurrayi and Lucy Yukenbarri Napanangka. All three grew up living traditional lives in the outback, worked at the same time at Warlyirti Artists, and became widely successful in the 1990s. Despite shared influences and a love of bright colors, their deep knowledge of desert Country is expressed in different styles that assert their individuality and their own distinct voices.

March 16, 2023 - March 3, 2024

On view in the Kluge-Ruhe Main Galleries

Performing Country, an exhibition highlighting never-before-seen works from the museum’s permanent collection, explores the ways Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists explore the complex idea of Country – the people, plants, animals, creator beings, and stories that all emerge from the place they call home.

Each work offers a different perspective on the performance of culture and Country. The artworks invite you to consider a constantly unfolding artistic tradition, performed anew in each pattern, song and ceremony. In the gesture and movement of these artworks, consider the moment of creation: when the artist’s hand moved across the canvas or when the ancestors danced across the earth. Just as every action performed in ceremony is simultaneously new and old, these works call you to be in both the present and the eternal everywhen. 

From the sweeping brushstrokes of Emily Kame Kngwarreye, to the body paint designs of Tiwi ceremonies reproduced on canvas, to the scarred surfaces of Tony Albert’s photographic series Brothers, to the palpable vibrations of Yukultiji Napangati’s desert dot paintings, Performing Country celebrates the indelible bond between embodied Indigenous identities and the land.

Performing Country was sponsored by the UVA Parents Program. It was curated by Emmy Monaghan and Brendan O’Donnell with Henry Skerritt.