Excavating University Campus Expansions

"I’m currently leading a multi-year design investigation to deconstruct official histories of postwar & ongoing university campus expansions across the U.S. The
research analyzes design tactics & linguistic nuances practiced by corporate-municipal-state-federal alliances that were forged by universities to expand their
campuses at the expense of Black & immigrant neighborhoods whose demolitions are excluded from official histories—all in the name of progress.
Phase One of the research—funded by the Harry der Boghosian Fellowship at Syracuse University and supported by a MacDowell Fellowship—focused on the
case study of modernist architect Mies van der Rohe’s design for the Illinois Institute of Technology postwar campus expansion into Chicago’s Black Belt. The
research resulted in a built installation that serves as a subversive, counter-historical archive and a demonstration memorial to decolonize IIT’s campus history,
as well as a symposium that convened a cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional group of scholars in art, architecture, anthropology, historic preservation, and
conservation, whose works grapple with overlooked historical materials.
The installation is currently safely stored in a storage unit in Lexington as I apply for an exhibition space to host its second life and iteration. The research and
installation were recently presented as part of the “Colonial Forms and Racial Politics” panel of the Designing Urban Universities Conference at Trinity College
Dublin in Ireland (June 2023), and will be presented at the 2023 Conference for the Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians in Little Rock, AR
(September 2023), the “Reparations & the Right to the City” 10th Biennial Conference for the Urban History Association in Pittsburgh, PA (October 2023), and the
Symposium of Urban Design History and Theory (SUDHT) in Delft, Netherlands (November, 2023).
Phase Two, currently underway, expands the research to trace campus expansions led by Jacques Brownson—a former student and disciple of Mies van der
Rohe at IIT—into Denver’s primarily Hispanic Auraria neighborhood, as well as other case studies across America. As a faculty member at the School of
Architecture, I’m currently serving as a summer research mentor to my former undergraduate student Mariana Mesa Castillo, who received a 2023 CURE
Fellowship in the UNITE RPA to collaborate on researching this history and producing drawings that analyze the extents of demolitions. During the 2023-2024
academic year, I will be visiting university archives in Colorado, Indiana, and South Carolina to digitize relevant documents that will supplement a series of built
installations, publications, and symposia that will convene design practitioners, historians, and urban planners."