Ana María León, assistant professor, History of Art, University of Michigan, presents the lecture “You Are Standing On Occupied Land” at 6:00 p.m. via Zoom as part of the Rice Architecture Fall 2020 Lecture Series.
The text written across the Chicago Cultural Center windows looking onto Michigan Ave reads: "You are looking at unceded land." The sign, installed by the Settler Colonial City Project at the 2019 Chicago Architecture Biennial, makes the observer aware of a history that has been erased for too long. Understanding the history of unceded land brings us to a present of occupied land. León will discuss her research, teaching, and practice as the result of these statements.
Ana María León is an architect and a historian of objects, buildings, and landscapes. Her work studies how spatial politics inform the modernity of the Americas. She is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan and holds a PhD in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture from MIT. León is co-founder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including Detroit Resists, the Settler Colonial City Project and Nuestro Norte es el Sur. She is currently the Charles P. Brauer Faculty Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities and co-directs the Decolonizing Pedagogies Rackham Interdisciplinary Workshop.
Rice Architecture Fall 2020 Lectures are part of an initiative to acknowledge, understand, and act on systemic racism in the built environment. Invited designers, scholars, and activists will speak on the relationship between race, architecture, and, by extension, related questions of social equity, environmental justice, and gender parity. The aim of the lecture series is to foreground these issues in the school’s curriculum while more broadly fostering solidarity and action in architecture.
All lectures are free and open to the public. Please be sure to register online for each lecture to receive the link to join. For more information on all lectures and to register to attend, visit arch.rice.edu/latest/events and ricedesignalliance.org.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund and the William B. Coleman, Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture.
Rice Design Alliance’s Civic Forum is made possible through the generous support of the Humanities Research Center with additional support from the Texas Commission on the Arts. Funding also is provided by RDA Underwriters: Harvey |Harvey-Cleary, Tellepsen, W.S. Bellows Construction Corp., Hines, HKS, Inc., MLN Company, m Strategic Partners, TRIO Electric, and Walker Engineering, Inc. For RDA’s Houston Design Research Grant lunchtime lectures by awardees De Peter Yi (Faculty winner); Anna Fritz, Shree Kale, and Edward Liew (Student winners); and Sebastián López and Lene Sollie (Honorable Mention), please visit ricedesignalliance.org. The Houston Design Research Grant lunchtime lectures are made possible through the generous support of The Mitsui U.S.A. Foundation.
All Fall 2020 evening lectures are eligible for one AIA/CES Learning Unit. Rice Design Alliance is an AIA/CES Registered Provider of quality educational programs. Watch the lecture, download the pdf, and submit for credit.