This event will be conducted in-person in the Third Floor Lobby and through Zoom.

For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.
For In-Person attendance, please register here.

Histories of Ecological Design; An Unfinished Cyclopedia presents conflicting definitions and concepts of architects and designers and the parallel histories of their intellectual positions toward environmental thought from the 19th century to today. To survey the formation of this field, the context is not exclusively examined chronologically, but also in connected worldviews, each rendering evolving perceptions of nature, its relation to culture, and the occupation of the planet by human and non-human subjects. The book showcases that ecological design starts with the reconceptualization of the world as a complex system of flows rather than a discrete compilation of objects, which visual artist and theorist György Kepes has described as one of the fundamental reorientations of the 20th century.

A conversation with Stan Allen and Cynthia Davidson will follow Lydia Kallipoliti’s book presentation.

Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology, and environmental politics. She is an Associate Professor at the Cooper Union in New York and the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018) and Histories of Ecological Design (2024). Her work has been awarded, published, and exhibited widely including the Venice Biennial, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, the Oslo Architecture Trienalle, the Lisbon Triennale, the Royal Academy of British Architects, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and the London Design Museum.  She is the principal of ANAcycle research thinktank and Head Co-Curator of the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale. Kallipoliti holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from AUTh in Greece, a Master of Science (SMArchS) from MIT and a PhD from Princeton University.

Stan Allen is an architect and George Dutton ’27 Professor of Architecture at Princeton University.  His practice Stan Allen Architect has realized buildings and urban projects in the United States, South America and Asia. Responding to the contemporary city in creative ways, Allen has developed an extensive catalogue of innovative design strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize design practice. Parallel to this large-scale work he has recently completed a number of private houses and artist’s studios on rural sites in the Hudson River Valley. His architectural work is published in Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City and his essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation. The edited volume Landform Building: Architecture’s New Terrain was published by Lars Müller in 2011, and his most recent book is Situated Objects, published by Park Books in 2020. In 2009 he received the John Q. Hejduk Award, and in 2002, a President’s Citation for Exceptional Contributions to Architecture from the Cooper Union.

Cynthia Davidson is editor of the architecture journal Logand the former ANY magazine, an architecture theory tabloid. She is responsible for more than 40 books in print, including 26 books in the Writing Architecture series, published with MIT Press. She cocurated “The Architectural Imagination,” an exhibition of speculative projects for Detroit shown in the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, and “Model Behavior,” shown at The Cooper Union in 2022. Davidson also teaches at Princeton’s School of Architecture, in Pratt’sGraduate Architecture and Urban Design program, and Cornell’s College of Architecture, Art and Planning program in Manhattan. In 2014, the American Academy of Arts and Letters recognized her work with its Architecture Award.

This event is free and open to the public. The talk will be presented in conjunction with the Third Floor Hallway Gallery exhibition Lydia Kallipoliti: Histories of Ecological Design—An Unfinished Cyclopedia.