The Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series, "New Proximities," is a collective reckoning of health as a social, political, and fundamentally spatial condition. The global pandemic has not only produced profound shifts in the built environment, but also revealed latent precarities embedded in forms of governance, labor, domesticity, and ecology. This lecture series asks: How does COVID-19 and its compounding crises render visible the uneven geographies in which we operate? How might we reformat existing systems beyond the confining world of pandemic space? Expanding scales and spaces of architectural agency, we will hear from critical voices in design, history, and theory to imagine new futures of care and proximity.
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, or click the links below.
Faculty Talks and Lectures via Zoom: Mondays and Wednesdays at 12:00 p.m. or 6:00 p.m. CST.
Llewelyn-Davies Sahni Innovative Practice Lecture
Elizabeth Timme and Chaz Kern
Co-Executive Director, and Program Manager, Design Lead
LA Más, Los Angeles
I Heard You Build Benches
Wednesday, February 10, 12:00 p.m.
Troy Schaum
Associate Professor, Rice Architecture
Partner, SCHAUM/SHIEH
Faculty Talk: Blanking
Monday, February 15, 12:00 p.m.
Albert Pope
Gus Sessions Wortham Professor, Rice Architecture
Faculty Talk: A Promethean Increment
Monday, February 22, 12:00 p.m.
CARE-WORK: Spaces, Bodies, and the Politics of Care
Virtual symposium organized by Brittany Utting, Assistant Professor, Rice Architecture
Virtual symposium
Tuesday, March 2, 10:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m.–3:30 p.m.
Closing Keynote Lecture: Silvia Federici, Ph.D.
Professor Emerita of New College, Hofstra University, New York
Wednesday, March 3, 6:00 p.m.
Panelists: f-architecture (Co-founded by Virginia Black, Rosana Elkhatib, and Gabrielle Printz); Maria S. Giudici (Head of History and Theory, School of Architecture, Royal College of Art; Editor, AA Files); Jia Yi Gu (Director of MAK Center for Art and Architecture and Visiting Faculty at California College of the Arts); HOME-OFFICE (Co-founded by Brittany Utting, Assistant Professor, Rice Architecture, and Daniel Jacobs, Adjunct Faculty in Architecture, University of Houston); Torsten Lange, Ph.D. (Guest Professor, Chair for Theory and History of Architecture, Art and Design, TU Munich); Fabiola López-Durán, Ph.D. (Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History, Rice University); Sarah Nichols (Assistant Professor, Rice Architecture); Rosario Talevi (Founder of Soft Agency; Co-director of Floating University Berlin).
Nayan Shah
Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity and History, University of Southern California
Spatial Inequities: The "Chinatown" Problem in Today's Pandemic Times
Wednesday, March 10, 12:00 p.m.
Huang Sheng-Yuan
Principal, Fieldoffice Architects
Living with Sky, Water and Mountain: A Path towards Freedom
Wednesday, March 17, 6:00 p.m.
Lydia Kallipoliti, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, The Cooper Union, New York; Principal, ANAcycle thinktank
Bubble Problems: An Archeology of Infection and Environmental Control
Wednesday, March 24, 12:00 p.m.
Hélène Frichot
Director, Bachelor of Design and Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, The University of Melbourne
Following the Dirt: Troubling Architecture
Wednesday, March 31, 6:00 p.m.
Christopher Hight
Associate Professor, Rice Architecture
Faculty Talk: Global Littorals
Monday, April 5, 12:00 p.m.
Jen Wood and Emanuel Admassu
Founding Principals, AD-WO;
Emanuel Admassu, Associate Professor, Rhode Island School of Design
Rice Design Alliance Spotlight Award + Lecture
Immeasurability
Wednesday, April 14, 12:00 p.m.
Rice Design Alliance Civic Forum 2021
Wednesday, April 21, 6:00 p.m.
This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of the Betty R. and George F. Pierce Jr., FAIA, Fund, the Wm. W. Caudill Lecture Series for Students in Architecture, and the William B. Coleman, Jr. Colloquium Fund for Architecture.
The Llewelyn-Davies Sahni Innovative Practice Lecture is made possible through the generous support of the Llewelyn-Davies Sahni Fund for the Rice School of Architecture.
Rice Design Alliance’s Spotlight Award + Lecture and the Civic Forum are made possible through the generous support of RDA members and Underwriters: MAREK, W.S. Bellows Construction Corp., Harvey | Harvey-Cleary, Tellepsen, Hines, HKS, Inc., MLN Company, m Strategic Partners, TRIO Electric, and Walker Engineering, Inc. Additional support is provided by a grant from the Texas Commission on the Arts.
CARE-WORK: Space, Bodies, and the Politics of Care is made possible through the generous support of the Rice University Humanities Research Center and Rice Architecture.
All spring 2021 lectures are eligible for one AIA/CES Learning Unit. Rice Design Alliance is an AIA/CES Registered Provider of quality educational programs.