Places to Co-Host Fitch Colloquium at Columbia

Next month, in collaboration with the Historic Preservation Program at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Places will co-host the school’s annual Fitch Colloquium, a day-long event dedicated to current issues in preservation.

Inspired by a conversation in Places with Columbia’s Jorge Otero-Pailos, published earlier this year, the 2024 Fitch Colloquium will explore how to rebalance architecture curricula in response to the cascading impacts of climate change. Can we challenge the longstanding pedagogical ideal that the highest service an architect can render society is to design for new construction?

The Colloquium will feature three panels, approaching issues of repair in architecture pedagogy from the perspectives of practice, academia, and publishing. Participants include Erica Avrami, Nick Axel, Daniel Barber, Deborah Berke, Shumi Bose, Mario Gooden, Olaf Grawert, Josephine Minutillo, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Andrea Roberts, and Mireille Roddier. Places Editor and Executive Director Nancy Levinson will moderate the panel on publishing.

This collaboration with Columbia GSAPP furthers the journal’s deep engagement with current issues in repair, preservation, maintenance, and reuse. Earlier this year, we launched “Repair Manual, a new series seeded by a grant from the Graham Foundation. This month, Places is publishing an ambitious eight-part narrative survey, “Field Notes: Repair,” featuring brief observations on practices of repair from nearly 100 leading scholars, designers, planners, activists, and artists.

The Fitch Colloquium is scheduled for Saturday, December 7, 2024, in Columbia’s Wood Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public. We hope you’ll join us.

Register to attend.