Events

Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series: Nora Akawi

Unbordering: Notes on Transmission

This lecture will be in person and is part of the Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited."

Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect living in New York. She is assistant professor of architecture at The Cooper Union and co-founder of interim studio with Eduardo Rega. She studies bordering and ruination as the architectural project of settler colonialism, and practices of land- and life-protection in anti-colonial and anti-carceral movements in Palestine, the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, and the Canary Islands. Most recently, she co-produced the collaborative multimedia exhibition Antum Al-Ṣaūt; Wa Naḥnu Ṣadāh (You Are The Voice; We Are It’s Echo) at the Graham Foundation for the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial. Nora served on the international jury of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2023 and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Architecture Education and Faktur: Documents and Architecture.

"Unbordering: Notes on Transmission":

I know that if you could
you’d strike a meteor from your eyes
to burn this world of oppression
and build a world anew

- Mahmoud Salman (Gaza, January 2024)

This talk will move through representations (archives, documentations, or conversations) of instances and practices, both spectacular and unnoticed, of land- and life-protection that erode the carceral time and space regime of Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine and the occupied Syrian Golan Heights (the Jawlan), and that offer glimpses into times and worlds where their oppressive architectures and infrastructures are dismantled.

Here, transmission is understood as a lens through which to read movements out of, and breaks with colonial time: as discharge, as disappearance, as reverberation, and as return. Facing colonial attempts of erasing and annihilating entire worlds, abolitionist movements for freedom bring us closer to decolonized futures both through the material erosion of the structures of genocidal regimes, and the flash imaginaries or recurring calls of the possible-necessary end of an oppressive world.

Palestine and the Jawlan are home to transgenerational traditions of resistance and refusal also in defending land and life through agricultural cooperatives, educational programs, situated art practices, and organized marches and festivals. In addition to collected materials, the presentation will include compiled excerpts from curatorial, editorial and pedagogical projects and studies in architecture. We will pose questions on the possibilities, pretenses and complicity, of architectural institutions, circuits, publications, exhibitions and pedagogies in the face of the basic demand for a stance against genocide.

"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 free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

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