PLEIN AIR TALKS 5. Sick Architecture with Beatriz Colomina

A lecture by Beatriz Colomina organized as part of the 2023 Plein Air Talks series, organized in conjunction with the advanced studio series “Plein Air” taught by Nahyun Hwang, initiated in the fall of 2020. The series explores the complex material and socio-political performance of air, and the intersectional vulnerabilities and agencies of air as a critical spatial medium.

Beatriz Colomina is an internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist who has written and curated extensively on questions of architecture, art, technology, sexuality, and media. She is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, the founding director of the Media and Modernity program at Princeton University, and the Director of Graduate Studies (Ph.D. program) in the School of Architecture. Her books include Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022, co-edited with Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister), X-Ray Architecture (Lars Muller, 2019), Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design (Lars Müller, 2016), The Century of the Bed (Verlag für ModerneKunst, 2015), or Sexuality and Space (Princeton Architectural Press, 1992), among many others. She has curated a series of international exhibitions, many of which traveled to multiple international locations, include: Clip/Stamp/Fold (2006-2013), Playboy Architecture (2012-2016) and Radical Pedagogies (2014- 2016, with Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister). Her latest exhibition Sick Architecture conceived with Silvia Franceschini and Nikolaus Hirsch opened at CIVA in Brussels in 2022. Colomina has been the recipient of many awards and fellowships, including the Samuel H. Kress Senior Fellowship at the CASVA (Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts), SOM Foundation, Le Corbusier Foundation, Graham Foundation, the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture), The American Academy in Berlin, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, and the Wissenschaftkolleg in Berlin, among many others.