“On the Edge of Legibility: Architecture and its Peripheries” Symposium Paper Presentations

In 1930, the Croatian art historian Ljubo Karaman theorized the “freedom of the periphery” as a highly dynamic space of syncretism and geopolitical interrelation. Karaman and his theories, though, have themselves remained peripheral to the Anglo-American academy, whose discourse on peripherality has been shaped largely by world-systems theories. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 The Modern World-System, for example, the globe is partitioned according to unidirectional exchanges between a core and periphery, and cultural hegemony is merely contingent on economic domination. Poet and thinker Édouard Glissant would reject such a reduction two decades later. Challenging the West’s empirical imperative to render the world legible and transparent, Glissant called for our “right to opacity,” wherein knowledges are entangled, irreducible, confluent, and relativized. Considering opacity as a precondition for cultural freedom, how can architectural historians engage the periphery on its own terms and with its own methods?

While easily conceived economically and geographically, we propose a lingering in the periphery, putting pressure on capitalist temporality and liberal epistemologies. While architectural historiography has treated the peripheral in diverse ways, what themes, events, sites, and actors remain at the edge of its discourse? How can architectural history imbricate itself in questions of the temporal and knowable? Recent turns to indigenous knowledge and post-secular reevaluations of modernity are starting points for re-interrogating the periphery. Aware of our position within the American academy, our ambition for this symposium is to foster dialogue on how we can attend to, uphold, research, study, and understand each other opaquely.

April 2, 2026, Symposium Keynote, 5PM Avery 114

       Ijlal Muzaffar” (Rhode Island School of Design)

April 3, 2026 Avery 114

Opening Remarks 9:00

Translations (9:20-10:40)

       Rami Kanafani (UPenn), “Track II Architecture and the Cold War Politics of the New Age”

       Man Joong Kim (SUNY Binghamton University), “The Architect as Social Organizer: Transpacific Exchanges Between South Korea and the United States During the Cold War”

       Yixuan Yang (Newcastle University), “Opacity, Mediation, and the Socialist Periphery: Architectural Knowledge between the USSR and China”

       Panel Respondent: Reinhold Martin, GSAPP

Coffee Break (10:40-11:00)

Epochs (11:00-12:20)

       Marco Salazar-Valle (UPenn), “Dealing with Inka evidence: Indigenous erasure and resistance at the margins of the Empire”

       Alican Taylan (Cornell), “Environmental Modernity from the Periphery: The Architecture of Sokoto circa 1804”

       Sam Hellmann (Columbia), “Culture-Worker: Architects and the Great Leap Forward”

       Panel Respondent: Lucia Galaretto, GSAPP

Lunch Break (12:20-1:20)

Revelations (1:20-3:00)

       Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz (UPenn), “Shells, Sand, and Spirits: The Church of Almofala in Brazil’s Northeast”

       Sam Rosner (University of Technology Sydney - UTS), “Artesian Modernities: Bores and Pastoral Stations on the Periphery (1890 – 1945)”

       Nicholas Lin (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Hieroglyph of Teeth: Paleoanthropology, Myths, and Sovereignty of Human Origins in Republican China”

       Panel Respondent: Elena M’Bouroukounda, GSAPP

Coffee Break (3:00-3:20)

Inscriptions (3:20-5:00)

       Jenny Ni (Columbia), “Presence Through Absence: Tipis, Rock Art, and the Re-Making of Place”

       Henry Osman (Brown), “Southern Circuits”

       Andrea Molina (University of California, Los Angeles), “Air as Periphery: When Enclosure Fails”

       Panel Respondent: Kian Hosseinnia, GSAPP