Lydia Kallipoliti
Associate Professor & Director MSAAD, Columbia University, GSAPP
Lydia Kallipoliti is an architect, engineer, and scholar whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics. She is the Director of the MS in Advanced Architectural Design and an Associate Professor at Columbia University [GSAPP] in New York.
Published December 19, 2024
Kallipoliti's talk seeks to reveal how architecture constructs, distributes, and leverages power via material upcycling, interspecies alliances, biopolitics and excremental processes. It maps and redraws the affinities of the built environment as a product of many forces, translated in the tensions between products and by-products, production, and consumption and, finally, creation and decomposition.
Further, Kallipoliti’s lecture will explore how we tend to think of human waste as a phantom material condition, relayed to the management of urban resources; yet it infiltrates the air and water we breathe. It is a matter intricately enmeshed with the “dirty” physiology of the body and is thus weaved into the ecology of habitation. While ecological systems of the postwar period portrayed the inhabitant as an indispensable part of building ecology, currently this image is dismissed. Environmental concerns promote a conservationist ethic and a list of cautionary daily practices of scarcity. Integrating the body's dirty physiology in the ecology of habitation potentially reveals alternative scenarios for handling waste as a resource in the future of urban environments.
Lydia Kallipoliti; Associate Professor; Director, MSAAD; Columbia University, GSAPP
Kallipoliti is the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018), the History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (2018) and the editor of EcoRedux, an issue of Architectural Design in 2010. 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 Onassis Cultural Center, 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, which has been named a leading innovator in sustainable design in Build’s 2019 and 2020 awards and Head Co-Curator of the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale that was the winning project of the year at 2023 Design Educates Awards. 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.
TOPICS: