Event Description:
Chicago-born architect and professor Germane Barnes explores the connections between identity and the built environment. Barnes uses research, design, and speculation to mine the social and political agency of architecture and uncover spatial histories, presents, and futures of Black self-determination. Barnes’ Wheelwright Prize lecture documents his research of the Western architecture canon through the lens of the African Diaspora. In particular, he examines how Eurocentric histories of classical architecture have neglected the contributions of North African building practices throughout Italy during antiquity. Barnes will present Columnar Disorder, his counter-narrative to the well-established legacy of the classical triumvirate: the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders.
Speaker:
Germane Barnes is the Principal of Studio Barnes and Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Barnes’ practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation.
His work has recently been exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art’s groundbreaking 2021 exhibition, Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a winner of the Architectural League Prize and is a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He was selected for the inaugural cohort of The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab, created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada. His work has also been published in and acquired for the permanent collections of international institutions, most notably San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, The New York Times, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture. His project, Griot, was widely published, as an installation in the Biennale Architettura 2023, Laboratory of the Future.
0:00 Introduction by Sarah Whiting
08:04 Lecture by Germane Barnes
50:55 Q+A