Lecture by Peter Ekman

Peter Ekman

Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture

University of Southern California

Lecture Description:

School of Urban and Regional Planning / Department of History, Classics, and Religion

University of Alberta

Doors Open at 6:30 pm

This lecture builds on Peter Ekman’s recently published book, Timing the Future Metropolis: Foresight, Knowledge, and Doubt in America’s Postwar Urbanism (Cornell University Press). A fine-grained intellectual history of urbanism, the book explores the shifting understandings of temporality that have animated architecture, planning, landscape architecture, and urban design, as fundamentally future-making propositions, since the Second World War. It presents the first full-scale history of urban studies, an interdisciplinary formation of expertise first named in the late 1950s, and routes that history through a vast transnational network of theorists and practitioners seeking to ground their designs on the urban future in methodical social research.

The lecture takes a hemispheric perspective on these questions. It tacks between several North American cities and an extended case study of contested New Town construction in 1960s Venezuela — at Ciudad Guayana, on broadly Modernist premises — to develop a new account of the circulation of urban and architectural knowledge during the global Cold War and in its aftermath. The Joint Center for Urban Studies, the sprawling institution at the core of the narrative, proves diagnostic or anticipatory of a range of Northern doubts and anxieties, often racialized, about the very knowability of “the future metropolis” as a terrain amenable to design intervention. Amid resurgent talk of urban crisis — and as it becomes ever more urgent to elaborate another set of temporalities entirely to project and architecturally counteract the urban impacts of planetary climate change — this talk describes a very present past.

Architects with an interest in the history of the profession will be familiar with quite a few names central to the narrative, among them Willo von Moltke, Edmund Bacon, Kevin Lynch, György Kepes, Fumihiko Maki, Clarence Stein, Catherine Bauer, and Lewis Mumford. The talk provides a new account of Modernism and its critics (still central to the historiography of architecture and curriculum of most architecture schools), reimagines the transnational contours of these debates, and relates them to present-day concerns in the epistemology and politics of design.

The talk reflects on the question of interdisciplinarity itself, focusing on a critical midcentury moment when the professional identity and boundaries of architecture were undergoing a realignment with respect to adjacent professions such as planning and to new, expressly hybrid fields such as urban design, environmental design, and urban studies. Architects tend to be future-oriented in their imagination practice; futurity is the tense in which designers think and act. This talk reflects on how the profession has mobilized knowledge of the urban past and present to realize its desired futures — and on the lessons we might extract from one large-scale example in which those futures did not come to pass.

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