The Knowlton School is pleased to announce the Spring 2022 Baumer Lecture Series. For spring 2022, the series returns to Knowlton Hall’s Gui Auditorium for nine in-person lectures that engage “The Possibilities of Infrastructure.” 

The Possibilities of Infrastructure

With the passage of a historic federal investment in the U.S. and reverberations of a global supply chain crisis felt in all corners of our daily lives, infrastructure once again looms large in the public consciousness. From its origins as a “humble” engineering term, infrastructure has come to denote the vast foundation work that enables modern life. Infrastructure binds the objects of the city and makes possible the links to social and economic activity in far-flung global landscapes. The term can signify roads and bridges as well as data and standards or procedures and places—all questioning the traditional boundaries of design and presenting possibilities for dynamic response. As the anthropologist Ashley Carse has claimed, infrastructure “has come to organize social expectations, everyday experiences, and public discourses about the proper relationships among economy, development, governance, and technology.”

Speakers this season will approach the connection between the design disciplines and the interstitial structures—abstract, concrete, below, above, between, and throughout—that make up the built environment.

• February 9
  Dana Cuff
• Canceled:  February 16
  Iñaki Echeverria
• February 23
  Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon
• March 2
  Taiwo Jaiyeoba
• March 9
  Mario Schjetnan
• Canceled: March 21
  Deborah Cowen
• March 30
  Hernán Díaz Alonso
• April 4 (Monday)
  Zelig Fok
• April 11 (Monday)
  Sylvia Lavin

The Baumer Lecture Series invites prominent researchers and practitioners of architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning to present their work and to engage topics both topical and enduring.