Cambridge Talks: Acts of Scaling
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Cambridge Talks is an annual conference organized by students of the PhD Program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and is generously supported by the GSD’s Advanced Studies programs. Cambridge Talks 2025: Acts of Scaling is organized by PhD students Matthew Kennedy and Adil Mansure, and advised by Antoine Picon, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, and Director of Doctoral Programs. Conference graphic identity designed by Willis Kingery.
Event Description
In 1977, nine years after its initial release, Ray and Charles Eames issued an amended version of their experimental film Powers of Ten, incorporating two additional scales, and thereby effecting “a hundredfold increase—to each end of the journey into the universe, and to the return trip to the microstructure of the carbon atom in the human body.” Drawing on up-to-the-moment scientific developments at scales both extra-large and extra-small, seizing upon the power of then-novel media and representational techniques to appeal to very different audiences, and venturing well beyond the ostensible borders of the design disciplines, the Eames’ visual and narrative encapsulation of a complex and interconnected universe displays precisely how scale, or more precisely how scaling, can shape imaginaries and practices across the arts, humanities, and sciences, as well as in popular culture. As technical innovations augment the scope of our powers both to perceive and to intervene, we are confronted with a relentless ordering and reordering of knowledge. This epistemological dilemma compels us to articulate new theoretical frameworks, to relentlessly renegotiate disciplinary boundaries, and to analyze, address, and problem-solve between—and often simultaneously at—an ever-proliferating range of scales.
For architects, landscape architects, and urban planners, no less than for historians and scientists in their many specializations, scale has historically served as a key element in the organization of disciplinary concerns, facilitating intellectual fixation upon, and rigorous examination of, a particular and coherent set of objects or circumstances, even when underpinned by a tacit understanding that things and phenomena of all scales are ultimately intertwined and mutually constituted. Recent decades, however, have been marked by a seeming destabilization of once reliable thresholds between these scales of consideration, owing, among other considerations, to the ethical, epistemological, even ontological exigencies of anthropogenic climate change. From Geoffrey West’s laws of scaling, applicable as much to microscopic organisms as to the complex dynamics of cities and territories, to the temporal and geological strata of the earth interrogated by archaeologists and geologists; from the hyper-local scales prioritized by microhistorians, to the sprawling and multifaceted networks of movement (of people, materials, and ideas) at the heart of the mobilities paradigm proposed by sociologists John Urry and Mimi Sheller; and from the humanistic global scale so central to political science, economics, and urban theory for the past half-century, to the more ecologically and philosophically synthetic planetary scale of history posited by Dipesh Chakrabarty—myriad theoretical and material confrontations, both explicit or implicit, emerge out of the hermeneutical work of scaling.
Indeed, the questions that arise out of generating knowledge—and rendering it commensurable—between scales, are both sprawling and complex. What events or phenomena in the history of design—and of environmental and spatial practices, broadly conceived—or of art, science, technology, etc., can be made more legible or more discursively generative by thinking about scalar translations and shifts? What biases, frameworks, or cosmologies may be brought to light? What behaviors, linear or nonlinear, come to the fore, and at what point do these behaviors begin to take on the semblance of patterns or even laws of scaling? How have scalar operations been deployed throughout history to seize and exercise social, economic, and political agency and power? How has the constant shifting of scalar frontiers, both extra-small or extra-large, impacted research across disciplines, and what potential may these exchanges hold for new forms of practice, new modes of investigation, new and hybrid bodies of knowledge? What instruments and techniques are employed to manage these scalar shifts and leaps, and how do they work? What media and modes of intermediation can be discussed? How has the framing of new scalar imaginaries, whether great or small, inflected the protocols of research and practice throughout history, whether in the design disciplines, or in the sciences and humanities that shape and attend to them?
Program
Friday, April 4th, 2025
3:00 p.m. — 6:30 p.m.
Sackler Building, 485 Broadway, Cambridge
Room 004 (Auditorium)
Welcome
3:00 — 3:45 p.m.
Dean’s Welcome
Sarah Whiting, Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture
Program Welcome
Antoine Picon, Director of Doctoral Programs, G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology
Opening Remarks: “Acts of Scaling”
Adil Mansure + Matthew Kennedy
Panel 1: Bodies + Fields
3:45 — 6:30 p.m.
Angeliki Giannisi, PhD Candidate, Technical University of Vienna
“Microliths They Are, Big Stones”
Taylor Dover, Head of Digital Body, Studio Olafur Eliasson
“Noticing the Body”
Sarah Hutcheson, PhD Candidate, Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Planning, Harvard GSD / GSAS
“In Absentia: Scales of the King’s Body”
Clemens Finkelstein, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Panel on Planetary Thinking, Justus Liebig University Giessen
“Planetary Abstraction, c. 1898: Trans-scalar Frontiers”
Distinguished Presenter
Daniel Lord Smail, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of History, Harvard University
“Scale in History”
Panel Discussion
Moderator: Erika Naginski, Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Architectural HistoryDaniel Lord Smail
Saturday, April 5th, 2025
9:00 a.m. — 6:30 p.m.
Gund Hall, 48 Quincy Street, Cambridge
Stubbins, Room 112
Introduction
9:00 a.m.
Opening Remarks: “Acts of Scaling”
Adil Mansure + Matthew Kennedy
Panel 2: Networks + Mobilities
9:15 a.m.
Lizzie Yarina, Assistant Professor, Northeastern University School of Architecture
“‘Full Water Control’: Mekong Delta Plans, 1969-1993”
Emily Holloway, Postdoctoral Fellow, Lindy Institute for Urban Innovation, Drexel University
“Jumping Scale in the Black Atlantic: Critical visuality in the archives of slavery”
Sofia Leoni, PhD, Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning, Politecnico di Torino
“Globalisations from the Countryside. Scaling Logistics in Rural China”
Romain David, PhD Candidate, Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Planning, Harvard GSD / GSAS
“Microhistory of Globalization: Affleurement de l’histoire and minor evidences”
Distinguished Presenter
Mimi Sheller, Dean of The Global School, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
“Cosmic Quantum: Topological and Temporal Imaginaries in Acts of Scaling Aluminum”
Panel Discussion
Moderator: Diane Davis, Charles Dyer Norton Professor of Regional Planning and Urbanism
Panel 3: Knowledge + Practices
1:00 p.m.
Chase Galis, PhD Candidate, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich
“No Sound, No Screaming, No Blood: Electrical Infrastructure and the New Scale of Disaster Medicine”
Hugo Betting, PhD Candidate, Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Planning, Harvard GSD / GSAS
“Small Lichens, Big Words”
Caner Arıkboğa, PhD Candidate, Architecture Department, Middle East Technical University
“Debris-scale: An Epistemological Tool for Rethinking Architectural Ecologies”
Distinguished Presenter
Peter Christensen, Arthur Satz Professor of the Humanities, Ani and Mark Gabrellian Director of the Humanities Center, Senior Associate Dean, School of Arts and Sciences, University of Rochester
“Micro-Patents, Macro-Patents: The Scale of IP in Architecture”
Panel Discussion
Moderator: Ana María León Crespo, Associate Professor of Architecture
Panel 4: Media + Landscapes
3:45 p.m.
Anny Li, PhD Student, Architecture, Landscape, and Urban Planning, Harvard GSD/GSAS)
“The 1960 Engineer Special Study of the Surface of the Moon: Photogeology between Earth and Selene”
Ana Luiza Nicolae, PhD Student, History of Science, Harvard University
“Down and Across: Water through the Imperial Valley and the Valle de Mexicali”
Shuyi Yin, PhD Candidate, Historic Preservation, Columbia GSAPP
“Scaling Heritage: Albrecht Meydenbauer’s Photogrammetry and Monument Documentation”
Chiara Di Leone-Rokmaniko, PhD Student, History of Science, UCLA
Maksym Rokmaniko, SCI-Arc
“Trypillian Settlements: An Archeology of the Critical Zone”
Distinguished Presenter
Kaja Tally-Schumacher, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture, Harvard GSD
“Pollen, Pigments, and Paleosols: Views into the Ancient Mediterranean World through Microscopic Portals”
Panel discussion
Moderator: Edward Eigen, Senior Lecturer in the History of Landscape and Architecture, Harvard GSD
Conclusion
Closing Remarks
Adil Mansure + Matthew Kennedy
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