Lectures

Sciame Lecture Series: Daniel Barber

A Not-so-Utopian Future: Architecture, Energy, and Climate in the 1940s

Daniel Barber, UPENN

Introduction by Associate Professor Elisabetta Terragni

Daniel A. Barber is an Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, where he is also chair of the PhD program in Architecture. He is also a Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2017-2020).

His research approaches the history of architecture as a lens through which to examine the dynamics of global environmental change; simultaneously, environment emerges as a crucial aspect of architectural histories as concerns over energy, climate, and materials, as well as challenges to growing inequity across race and class, become increasingly prominent aspects of the discourse.

Daniel’s book A House in the Sun: Modern Architecture and Solar Energy in the Cold War was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. A second book, Designing the Planetary Interior, is forthcoming. Articles have appeared in Public Culture, Grey Room, Technology and Culture, and The Avery Review. He is the editor of two series on the E-Flux Architecture platform – one on Images of Accumulation and the other on Structural Instability, based on a 2018 conference at Penn. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Center for the Environment and the Princeton Environmental Institute.

 

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held at 6:30 pm in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. Continuing Education Credit for registered New York architects is available.

Lecture series sponsored by Sciame . . . Where Building Is an Art.