History and Theory

Papers by Benjamin Bross and Tait Johnson have been accepted to the 75th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians in Pittsburgh.

Lecturer Tait Johnson was recently awarded funding from the College of Fine and Applied Arts for the project "Integrating Marginalized Voices and Post-Colonial Perspectives into the Architectural History Curriculum."

Benjamin Bross spoke with the Illinois News Bureau on ways that public space have changed in response to catastrophes and how they might change because of the pandemic. Read the interview.

Essays by Tait Johnson and Scott Murray are in press and will be published this summer in Constructing Building Enclosures: Architectural History, Technology and Poetics in the Postwar Era, edited by Clifton Fordham (Routledge, 2020).

Associate Professors John C. Stallmeyer and Lynne Dearborn contributed a chapter to the recently published Routledge Handbook on Historic Landscapes in the Asia-Pacific, edited by Kapila D. Silva.

In the class Design and Construction Futures, architecture students created virtual reality (VR) models of the Afric-American Picture Gallery (1859)—an important but little known work of Black speculative fiction.

Lecturer Tait Johnson explores an underlying process for how modern architectural materials spread during the twentieth century in a paper entitled “Enemies on the Same Side: Alcoa, Reynolds, and the Battle for Progress during WWII,” which he will present at the Construction History Society of America conference in May.

Teaching Assistant Professor Heather Grossman presented at The Middle Ages in the Modern World Biennial Conference in Rome, Italy, on November 23.

Lecturer Tait Johnson recently presented a paper at the ACSA Fall Conference in Milwaukee entitled, “Regulation, Profit, and Power: The Transversal Relationships of Twentieth-Century Aluminum Cladding Production.”

Assistant Teaching Professor Heather Grossman will present a paper at the 71st Annual International Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) in St. Paul, Minnesota, on April 19.