The Gibbs College of Architecture is excited to announce our Spring 2022 Lecture Series! This lecture series was made possible with support from the Bruce Goff Chair of Creative Architecture. Check back soon for updated information.
Presented by Cheryl Lockstone and Barrett Williamson, Anishinabe Design.
Now Available on YouTube!
Date: January 26th
Event Contact – Marjorie Callahan [mcallahan@ou.edu]
Anishinabe Design was formed in 2008 by Cheryl Lockstone, Citizen Nation Potawatomi and her spouse, Barrett Williamson, Principal Architect of the firm. Anishinabe Design focuses on serving the needs of the Native American Community with a design process that provides culturally appropriate and quality design and is a 51% majority Indian and woman-owned firm. We believe that we should be good stewards of our planet and we approach our design opportunities in ways that are ecologically responsible that stay within budget constraints.
Presented by C. Greig Crysler, UC-Berkeley, and Shiloh Krupar, Georgetown University.
Date: March 25th, 2 p.m.
Location: Zoom | Meeting ID: 983 7658 1537 | Passcode: 63334722
Event Contact: Wanda Liebermann [wkliebermann@ou.edu]
Crysler and Krupar will discuss their co-authored book Exaction: Territories of Austerity, Bias, Dross, which situates municipal debt and environmental disaster within a genealogy of American colonial finance and racial liberalism. A triptych of urban case studies, including the territory of Puerto Rico and its capital San Juan; Jefferson County Alabama and its county seat Birmingham; and Camden, New Jersey, explore governance by exaction through the entangled relations of water and sewage infrastructure, toxic waste, financial speculation, and political power. These city-based case studies track how economic and environmental crises unfold within longer colonial histories and political geographies of austerity and racial dispossession. The book is enriched by a sequence of original images and conceptual figures, making the histories of exploitation, resistance and community it recounts accessible to a diverse readership. The book will be published in 2022 as part of the Society and Space book series edited by Stuart Elden for Sage Publications.
Presented by C. Greig Crysler, UC-Berkeley, and Wanda Katja Liebermann, University of Oklahoma.
Date: March 28th, 12 p.m.
Location: Gould Hall Buskuhl Gallery
Event Contact: Wanda Liebermann [wkliebermann@ou.edu]
Greig Crysler is a Professor of Architecture History and Theory at the University of California at Berkeley and the Director of the Arcus Endowment at the College of Environmental Design. Since 2000, the endowment has supported a wide range of critical and creative activities at the intersection of LGBTQ, race, and other equity issues and architecture, city and regional planning, and landscape architecture. The Arcus Endowment introduces new generations of students to a practice of environmental design that respects difference, challenges hetero-normative assumptions, and confronts injustice and inequity in the making of buildings, communities, and metropolitan regions. Professor Crysler will discuss his experience running the Arcus Endowment and present examples of the range of projects the endowment has supported. Following in the Arcus footsteps, the Gibbs Design Activism Awards (GDAA) is adapted to the OU and Oklahoma context. Professor Wanda Katja Liebermann will discuss the GDAA’s broader objectives as well as address specific questions from students and faculty about what kinds of projects the GDAA can support and how to develop a successful proposal. Read more about the GDAA.
Presented by Karen Kubey, Pratt Institute/Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.
Date: April 8th, 2 p.m.
Location: Gould Hall, room 155
Event Contact: Francesco Cianfarani [francesco.cianfarani@ou.edu]
Karen Kubey is an urbanist specializing in housing and health. She is the editor of Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018) and served as the first executive director of the Institute for Public Architecture. Kubey co-founded the New York chapter of Architecture for Humanity (now Open Architecture/New York) and co-founded and led the New Housing New York design competition. Holding degrees in architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and the Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), Kubey began her career as a designer of below-market housing. She has received support from the New York State Council on the Arts and MacDowell. Currently a Visiting Associate Professor at Pratt Institute and an Adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP, she was a 2019-20 Faculty Fellow in Design for Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon.
Karen Kubey’s work centers questions, people, and places that the discipline of architecture has too often marginalized. Drawing on her creative practice and stories from her book Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity, she will explore ways to bring unlikely partners together to design and achieve ambitious shared outcomes.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Climate Change, Migration, and Habitation, featuring keynote speakers Saskia Sassen, Columbia University, and Traci Rose Rider, North Carolina State, and over a dozen experts from across OU.
Key Dates: Opening Keynote by Traci Rose Rider - April 13th at 4 p.m. in Nielsen Hall, room 170. Symposium - April 14th, 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art
Event Contact: Felipe Flores [ff@ou.edu]
The scope of climate change requires a coalition of resiliency scholars with transdisciplinary expertise in the sciences, social sciences, humanities, Indigenous studies, and design. The Resilient Futures Symposium brings together experts from across the OU campus and beyond to share expertise and explore ways our built environments may be adapted to facilitate wellbeing for both people and planet.
All-day symposium presenters include Saskia Sassen (virtual keynote), as well as Wenwen Cheng, Francesco Cianfarani, Emma Colven, Simone Domingue, David Ebert, Lee Fithian, Sharon Hausam, Vanessa Morrison, Tom Mueller, Lauren Mullenbach, Chie Noyori-Corbett, Randy Peppler, Rachel Riley, Todd Stewart, and Angela Zhang.
Presented by Dr. Adedoyin Teriba, Vassar College.
Date: April 15th, 11:30 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.
Location: Zoom
Event Contact: Dr. Tamar Zinguer [tz@ou.edu]
From 1830 — 1900 thousands of ex-slaves of African-descent emigrated to the Lagos Colony creating religious, royal and funerary architecture. What is distinctive about their structures was the way in which the ex-slave appropriated architectural forms of colonialists and even slave masters in Brazil order to start afresh as free individuals. This lecture will explore how their buildings articulated what the freedom that they sort.
Presented by Dr. Adedoyin Teriba, Vassar College.
Date: April 22nd, 11:30 a.m. - 12:20 p.m.
Location: Zoom
Event Contact: Dr. Tamar Zinguer [tz@ou.edu]
This lecture, a continuation of the previous one, will show how the architecture of the ex-slaves metamorphosed due to its interaction with motifs, customs and other architectural prevalent in Southwest Nigeria.
Adedoyin Teriba is an Assistant Professor of modern and contemporary architecture & urbanism at Vassar College. His research interests focus on the built environments of setters/migrants of African Descent in West Africa from the 18th century to the present day; Architecture and Ontology; as well as the ways in which folklore, orality, language and critical regionalism in architecture intersect. Teriba is also interested in how “indigeneity” in architecture is perceived and constructed. A University of Oklahoma alumnus, he took his Ph.D. from Princeton University and has been the recipient of grants from the Center of Arts and Cultural Policy Studies as well as the Program of Latin American Studies at Princeton University. His most recent publications are “Style, Race and Architecture of a Mosque of the Òyìnbó Dúdú (White-Black) in Lagos Colony, 1894,” in Race and Modern Architecture: A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020) and “Prolegomenon to a Civilization in the Motherland: The Diaspora’s Architecture & Societal Aims in Colonial West Africa,” in Design Dispersed. Forms of Migration and Flight (Bielefeld: Transcript Publishing House, 2019). Before becoming an historian, Teriba worked as an architect in the United States and Nigeria and is still committed to making a difference in the professional world, especially in West Africa.
Presented by Matteo Jean Pietrobelli, PE, Principal – Regional Manager of Maffeis Engineering.
Date: April 22nd, 1:30 p.m. - 3 p.m.
Location: Gould Hall, room 155
Event Contact: Esin Pektas [esin.pektas@ou.edu]
Matteo Jean Pietrobelli, a licensed structural engineer and the Principal – Regional Manager of Maffeis Engineering, will be at the Gibbs College of Architecture on April 22 to give a lecture on the innovative building enclosure system ETFE. ETFE (Ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) is a lightweight building enclosure system that is a superb alternative to glass. Pietrobelli is a structural and systems Professional Engineer and is currently the Principal-Regional Manager of Maffeis Engineering.
Presented by Dr. Adedoyin Teriba, Vassar College.
Date: April 25th, 2 p.m.
Location: Gould Hall Buskuhl Gallery
Event Contact: Francesco Cianfarani [francesco.cianfarani@ou.edu]
The design of housing is both universal and contingent on context. It is universal in the sense that it is highly technical and regulated, and contingent to the extent that it is deeply affected by the cultural, climatic and economic conditions of its setting. In this lecture, Vassallo will explain a series of recent international housing projects through such dual lens, with special attention to how local conditions elicit different responses from the architect.
Jesús Vassallo is a Spanish architect and writer, and currently an associate professor at Rice University. His work focuses on the problem of realism in architecture through the production of design and scholarship. He is the author of Seamless: Digital Collage and Dirty Realism in Contemporary Architecture (Park Books, 2016) and recently completed his second manuscript titled Epics in the Everyday. His articles have been published internationally in magazines such as El Croquis, AA Files, 2G, Log, Harvard Design Magazine, Domus, or Arquitectura Viva. Since 2011 he serves as editor of Circo magazine.
The University of Oklahoma College of Architecture is proud to announce that Model Schools in the Model City, authored by Director of the Institute for Quality Communities, Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., has been named one of ten finalists for the 2026 ASALH Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and Culture.
This semester, students in the LA 5535 Studio: Ecological Planning and Design, led by Prof. Afsana Sharmin, took on an ambitious hypothetical project to redesign key parts of the OU campus. Their mission: to tackle the critical real-world challenge of stormwater management through innovative green design.
Petya Stefanoff, Chair of the Educational Committee with the American Planning Association, Oklahoma Chapter (APA-OK) and Gibbs College PhD candidate, has developed a new training program for local government officials. The program, focused on land use, zoning principles, and land development, recently certified its first graduates with Certified Citizen Planner status.
