ELEANORE PETTERSEN LECTURE | MARIA GIUDICI: CAREFREE, NOT CARELESS

7 East 7th Street,New York NY 10003

10 November, 2022

Description

This lecture will be conducted in-person in the Rose Auditorium and through Zoom. Care is one of the most powerful keywords in contemporary discourse, as it becomes increasingly clearer that the ecological crisis we face is entangled with forms of social and political violence. However, the way Western culture understands care is problematic: constructed as a dyadic, unidirectional effort geared to foster growth, the 'care' capitalism promotes might well be one of the hallmarks of environmental exploitation, rather than a solution to it. In this talk we will retrace the way such a culture of care was first articulated through the development of domestic space, analyzing the way in which the heteronormative family has been constructed as the hegemonic model of care. Through a series of case studies of residential architecture, we will discuss how the emergence and naturalization of specific architectural types has been both the cause and the effect of the effort to construct the very subjectivity of motherhood as the ultimate locus of caring. Modern housing educated its inhabitants to an idea of care that is inadequate, perhaps even dangerous when scaled up to the planet. Studying and challenging its domestic roots might help reimagine the spatial and political possibility for other forms of care to emerge: socialized rather than individualized, based on solidarity rather than on the protection of one's possessions. The lecture will be followed by a discussion moderated by Elisa Iturbe. Maria Shéhérazade Giudici leads the History and Theory course at the School of Architecture of the Royal College of Art and coordinates the PhD Programme of the Architectural Association. Maria is the founder of research platform Black Square and the editor of AA Files; her work focuses on the relationship between space and the construction of subjectivity. Elisa Iturbe is Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union. Her research is currently focused on the relationship between energy, power, and form and her writings have been published in AA Files, Log, Perspecta, Antagonismos, New York Review of Architecture, and more. Iturbe is also co-founder of Outside Development, a design and research practice. This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.