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

Post-Defense: Dissertation Research Beyond the PhD

Event Description

In “Post-Defense: Dissertation Research Beyond the PhD” the PhD program in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning takes a wide look at the topics and trajectories of PhD work at the GSD. Through presentations, roundtable and informal discussions, this year’s Cambridge Talks asks faculty, students, and alumni to reflect on the various stages of doctoral research and its afterlives beyond the PhD.

This event is open to HUID-holders in-person, and is open to the public via Zoom. Please use this link to register via Zoom .

Schedule

Day 1 – March 28:

1:30 – 3:30 Graduate Student Presentations (Gund 109)

This session brings together four PhD students who will describe aspects of their doctoral work

• Christina Shivers
• Caroline Filice Smith
• Samira Daneshvar
• Romain David

4:00 – 5:30 Round Table Discussion (Piper)

This faculty conversation will reflect on the history, evolution, and impact of the PhD program at the GSD

• Dean Sarah Whiting
• Diane Davis
• Ed Eigen
• Erika Naginski
• Moderation by Program Director Antoine Picon

Day 2 – March 29:

The speakers’ sessions will explore key publications and their intellectual development from pre to post PhD

2:00-3:30 – Panel 1 (Gund 124)

• Sun-Young Park (GSD PhD ‘14)
• Christina Crawford (GSD PhD ‘16)

4:00-5:30 – Panel 2 (Gund 124)

• Matthew Lasner (GSD PhD ‘07)
• Christina Crawford, Matthew Lasner, and Sun-Young Park in conversation

Speakers

Sun-Young Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. She is a scholar of 19th-century France who studies the intersections of architectural, urban, and medical history. She is the author of Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris (published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2018), and is currently working on a new book project titled The Architecture of Disability in Modern France. Sun-Young received a BA from Princeton University, and an MArch and PhD from Harvard University. Her work has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, National Endowment for the Humanities, Graham Foundation, and Society of Architectural Historians, among others.

Christina E. Crawford is an architectural and urban historian, a trained architect, and assistant professor of architectural history at Emory University, whose research focuses on the transnational exchange of ideas about housing and urban form in the twentieth century. Her research and publications have been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Getty Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the College Art Association, among other institutions. She is the author of Spatial Revolution: Architecture and Planning in the Early Soviet Union (Cornell University Press, 2022), and co-editor of Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917-1945 (MIT Press, 2023). Christina’s new research explores interwar exchanges of housing expertise between the US and Europe, using Atlanta as a primary node. She serves on the board of the Society of Historians of Eastern European, Eurasian and Russian Art and Architecture.

Matt Lasner is associate professor of urban studies and planning at Hunter College, where he teaches courses on U.S. and global urbanism, housing, and the built environment. He has written widely on the culture, politics, and design of twentieth-century U.S. housing. He is author of the award-winning High Life: Condo Living in the Suburban Century, a history of co-ops, condominiums, and townhouse complexes in New York, D.C., Chicago, Miami, and L.A., and co-editor of Affordable Housing in New York: The People, Places, and Policies That Transformed a City. He is currently writing two books: “Apartment: Making Homes Together in Postwar America,” about private multifamily housing, and “The Communitarians: Bay Area Architects and the Quest to Rehouse America,” about progressive community planning. He is also a founding editor of the Web journal PLATFORM. In addition to his PhD in architecture, he holds a master’s degree in urban and regional planning studies from the London School of Economics.

Other Histories of the Digital

Cambridge Talks 2019

The historical narrative of digital architecture that has developed in the past two decades has been narrow in scope. Accounts have often focused on North American and European architects using personal computers and modeling software in schools and offices. Other Histories of the Digital aims to expand the discussion. What stories and methods come to the fore as we look at computation as a phenomenon with global reach, and which implicates many media and diverse forms of labor?

 

April 1

PhD Colloquium
2:30 – 5:30, Stubbins Room 112

Presentations of research by PhD students at the Graduate School of Design.
– Brandon Finn
– Demetra Vogiatzaki
– Jacobé Huet
– Matthew Allen

 

Keynote Lecture: “The Augmented Architect”
6:30 – 8:00, Piper Auditorium

– Michael Osman (UCLA), author of Modernism’s Visible Hand: Architecture and Regulation in America

 

April 2

Symposium Presentations (Stubbins 112)

Panel 1: Media
11:00 – 12:30, Stubbins Room 112

– Olga Touloumi (Bard)
– Theodora Vardouli (McGill)
– John May (Harvard)
-respondent: Andrew Holder (Harvard)

Media techniques, media infrastructures, media regimes: the many overlapping valences of “media” has made the term a favorite among historians seeking to reframe their subjects. At the same time, digital architecture involves one of today’s most ubiquitous mediators: the interactive computer. This poses a wicked problem for historians: potential directions of investigation tend to spiral outward, from mines of rare earth metals and factories producing chips, to corporate offices and management techniques, to manufacturing processes and software ecologies — the list goes on. Within such assemblages, buildings and their architects might begin to disappear as insignificant parts. One thing is certain: history is written differently when it is written from the perspective of media. What should be included in media histories of the digital? And what are the methods to use?

Lunch

Panel 2: Labor
1:30 – 3:00, Stubbins Room 112

– Sean Keller (IIT)
– Andrew Witt (Harvard)
– Daniel Cardoso Llach (Carnegie Mellon)
– respondent: TBD

Computation has often been understood as a threat to architecture in a very concrete way: optimizing workflows threatens to make architects obsolete. This has not happened, yet, but digital architecture has employed new forms of labor and redistributed power across the professional landscape. Offices now employ so-called “CAD monkeys” and “digital savants,” and “draftsman” is an anachronistic job description. Hierarchies have not disappeared, and yet authority sometimes consolidates in the hands of whomever “owns” the BIM file. Slick renderings of alluring forms might be all the more effective at occluding abhorrent working conditions than were their hand-drafted equivalents. Historians face their own conundrums in sorting out these issues. How can historians give voice to the voiceless? Where do we find the evidence of practices and thoughts so common as to be left unrecorded?

Roundtable Discussion
3:30 – 5:00, Stubbins Room 112
– moderated by Antoine Picon (Harvard)

Cambridge Talks 2019 is generously supported by the History and Theory Platform and the Advanced Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Organized by Matthew Allen, Phillip Denny, and Christina Shivers.

Bound and Unbound: The Sites of Utopia

In the five hundred years since the publication of Thomas More’s Of A Republic’s Best State and of the New Island of Utopia (1516), the project of imagining an ideal society has emerged as simultaneously regenerative and devastating on multiple fronts: for the concept of the polity, for the composition of social fabrics, and, most relevant from the vantage of the design disciplines, for the formation of buildings, cities, and territories. This year’s Cambridge Talks, now in its tenth edition, aims to provide a spectrum of exemplary instances of utopia’s modern guise.

In the main conference panels, we bring together speakers to address the rivalry between those utopian endeavors that organize space mainly through social relations and production, and those whose expansive impulse searches out some form of technical mastery over spatial configuration. In other words, utopia can be understood as either embodied or totalizing, bound or unbound. By taking examples from the 19th and 20th centuries, the case studies presented here—from communes and plantations to infrastructural projects and global ecologies—exhibit various attempts to imagine social conditions alongside spatial ones. A concluding discussion will touch upon the philosophical and theoretical ramifications of utopia today.

April 14, 3 PM – 6 PM

PhD Colloquium

Respondents:

• Ana Miljački, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Sonja Dümpelmann, Harvard University

April 15, 9 AM – 5 PM

Panel 1: Embodied Utopia

• Luis Casteñeda, Syracuse University
• Joyce Chaplin, Harvard University
• Erika Naginski, Harvard University
• Respondent: Catherine Ingraham, Pratt Institute

Panel 2: Total Utopia

• Daniel Barber, University of Pennsylvania
• Sara Pritchard, Cornell Univesity
• Abby Spinak, Charles Warren Center, Harvard University
• Respondent: John May, Harvard University

Keynote Lecture

• Damian White, Rhode Island School of Design
• Discussants: K. Michael Hays and Neil Brenner, Harvard University

Sponsor
Doctoral Program. More information: [email protected]

Contact
Anyone requiring accessibility accommodations should contact the events office at (617) 496-2414 or by email at [email protected].