This event will be conducted in-person in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

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As frequent and longtime collaborators—frequently on the subject of collaboration—Amanda Reeser Lawrence and Ana Miljacki will discuss their recent work on the concepts of “influence” and “co-authorship.” Conversation will be the format as well as the topic of our presentation, weaving together themes of originality and unoriginality, single and multiple authors in dialogue across space and time, as well as questions of intellectual property.

Ana Miljački is a historian, critic, curator and Professor of Architecture at MIT, where she directs the SMArchS program. In 2018, Miljački launched MIT’s Critical Broadcasting Lab, engaged in critical, curatorial, and broadcasting work. She was one of three curators of the US Pavilion for the 14th Venice Biennale in 2014, with the project OfficeUS. Miljački is the author of The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle 1938-1968 (Routledge, 2017), co-editor of the OfficeUS series of books, guest editor of Praxis 14: True Stories, the editor of Terms of Appropriation: Modern and Architecture and Global Exchange with Amanda Reeser Lawrence (Routledge, 2018), as well as of The Under the Influence symposium proceedings (Actar, 2019). She recently coedited LOG 54: Coauthoring with Ann Lui, and an issue of JAE titled Pedagogies for a Broken World, with Igor Marjanović and Jay Cephas. Since 2021 she has been collaborating with the Architectural League of New York on a podcast titled: I Would Prefer Not To. The student work of her Collective Architecture Studio was featured in the Great Repair exhibition, at the Akademie der Kunst in Berlin in the fall and winter of 2023. Critical Broadcasting Lab’s project The Pilgrimage | Pionirsko hodočašće was on view at Palazzo Mora in Venice from May to November 2023, and its expanded version will be featured in the Architecture Biennial in Timişoara, Romania, curated by Oana Stǎnescu and titled: Cover me Softly, in the fall of 2024.

Amanda Reeser Lawrence is Professor at the School of Architecture at Northeastern University where she serves as Associate Director and Undergraduate Coordinator. Lawrence is founding coeditor of the architectural journal Praxis: A Journal of Writing + Building, an award-winning journal of contemporary architecture of the Americas. Her published books include: The Architecture of Influence: The Myth of Originality in the Twentieth Century (UVA Press, 2023); Terms of Appropriation: Modern Architecture and Global Exchange (Routledge 2017), with Ana Miljacki; James Stirling: Revisionary Modernist (Yale University Press, 2013); and Agenda: The Official Catalogue of the 2014 Architecture Biennale in Venice, (Lars Muller, 2014) with Ana Miljacki, Eva Franch I Gilabert, and Ashley Schafer. The Architecture of Influence was selected as the Booklaunch Architectural Book of the Year 2024. Her essays and reviews have appeared in Praxis, Log, Perspecta, Future Anterior, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, OASE, Architectural Research Quarterly, and Architectural Theory Review. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and the New York State Council on the Arts. She received her PhD in architectural history and theory from Harvard University, her Master of Architecture from Columbia University and her BA (summa cum laude) from Princeton University.

This event is free and open to the public.