News

The fall 2024 Sciame lecture series, Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited, examines innovative solutions to the global housing crisis. It situates our contemporary dilemma in the powerful arguments made by Friedrich Engels in the 1870s and 1880s. In his revolutionary text, The Housing Question, Engels argued that the dearth of adequate shelter was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As a result of working-class exploitation endemic to capitalist modernity, the housing crisis was resolvable only by a revolutionary reconstruction of workers’ power that would result in the collective ownership of land and the means of production. “Design Matters” inverts Engels’s argument, putting design, architecture, and planning first. It expands his geographic, cultural, and temporal frame to include cities outside of Western Europe, and it probes places damaged by the devastating consequences of war, the climate emergency, and other catastrophes. A bevy of on-the-ground examples, conceived at multiple scales and aimed at reconstruction, are changing policy, politics, practice, and design. In the face of extraordinary challenges, architects, planners, and providers are collaborating to produce humane affordable solutions to the housing crisis, and suggesting that architecture is needed to provoke political change.

All lectures are in-person, free, and held at 5:30 pm at the Spitzer School of Architecture (Sciame Auditorium). For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

We look forward to seeing you in person!

Thursday, 09/05/2024
Homes at Work: Urban Informality and Recognition in Latin America and Africa
María Carrizosa

Thursday, 09/12/2024
The Persistent Design-Politics of Race in American Public Housing
Lawrence Vale

Thursday, 10/10/2024
The 1931 Aluminaire House and Housing
Jon Michael Schwarting & Frances Campani

Thursday, 10/17/2024 
From Rapid Sheltering to Social Housing
Anna Pashynska & Tania Pashynska

Thursday, 10/24/2024
Unbordering: Notes on Transmission
Nora Akawi

Thursday, 11/07/2024 
Cultural + Urban Landscapes: Designing for Local Communities in Haiti
Sabine Malebranche

This Sciame lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74,
CEO of Sciame Construction.

Thursday, 09/19/2024
Special Event:
Under the Dome: Politics, Crisis, and Architecture at the United States Capitol
Alan Hantman, FAIA, ’65, ’66, ’79
The Samuel Rudin Lecture