Architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti presents Spring 2025 Dean's Lecture

On the evening of January 29, the UB School of Architecture and Planning kicked off its Spring 2025 lecture series with a talk by architect, engineer, and scholar Lydia Kallipoliti. This semester’s public, four-part series is centered around the relationship between AI, design, and the environment with a particular focus on distinctions and commonalities between artificial and natural intelligence.

This event also had the distinction of being named the Dean’s Lecture, which Dean Julia Czerniak sees as an opportunity for her to draw on the colleagues and contacts that she’s made over the course of her 30-year career to bring different perspectives in architecture, planning, design, and landscape to the School. So, why Lydia? Dean Czerniak reflected, “Lydia is a rare combination of accomplished scholar, incredible designer, sought-after educator, and really generous colleague. Her efforts to shape discourse on sustainability and design position her as a thought leader in the creation of a kind of imaginative, resilient, and resource-conscious urban future.”

Kallipoliti is the Director of the MS in Advanced Architectural Design program and an Associate Professor at Columbia University [GSAPP] in New York. She holds a diploma in architecture and engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, an MS in Architecture Studies from MIT, and a Ph.D. from Princeton University. Her research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology, and environmental politics, and she’s authored several published works including, most recently, Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia, around which this talk was mainly centered.

In this work, she examines ideas of nature as fabrications of culture, exploring concepts ranging from the 19^th century to today. These are broken down into three overarching categories: Naturalism (1866-World War II) Searching for “Roots”; Synthetic Naturalism (1966-2000) Searching for “Systems”; and Dark Naturalism (2000-present day) Searching for “Data”. She stressed, however, that these are not meant to be siloed, and her writing illustrates how she’s made connections between all three by examining interconnected categories and common threads – “each one of them rendering evolving perceptions of nature, its relation to culture, and the occupation of the planet by human and non-human, or more-than-human, subjects.” The possibilities for further connections are limitless, thus the “unfinished” nature of this cyclopedia.

The complex nature of this subject matter also created a challenge for Kallipoliti as she sought to express these multifarious connections through text, an inherently linear format. As a solution, she augmented the text with original illustrations for each chapter that she created using archived material as inspiration. This creative process has direct takeaways for burgeoning architects and designers – “it’s extremely important to think in different ways and to process information in different ways. Not just to write but also to draw, because the brain works in a different tentacle when it draws. And I think that examining a problem from all of those different perspectives simultaneously is one of the greatest strengths that designers have and what our agency affords us to contribute to the world.”

Another main theme was the acknowledgement that ecological history has been designed and shaped by the dominant voices of individuals and cultures in positions of power. This can be illustrated through various ecological hierarchies that place humans at the top of the natural order or through the transfer of European plant life to colonial territories during the 18^th century for bioengineering purposes. Kallipoliti reminded attendees that, “Architects and designers have been complicit in this position that humans, we are the caretakers of this planet and that the self, as a distinct biological and individual entity, possesses the power to analyze the world, make hierarchies, and construct ideological cosmologies that become our norms…it is crucial to acknowledge from the beginning that ecological history is a deeply rooted extractive colonial project.”

Kallipoliti also explored the history of ecology through two threads – climate and home. Climate was examined from a perspective of modernism and climatic control, citing examples throughout history of our efforts to control nature and the environment for the sake productivity, progress, and a rather narrow definition of comfort. The topic of home was explored through the lens of the home economy movement of the 19^th century – “it’s one of my favorites because it’s full of women designers” – discussing the impact of gender divisions on the very definition of ecology and its relationship with the home as well as movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s that strove to create self-sustaining homesteads meant to take control back from the State.

Finally, circling back once again to the title of the book, Kallipoliti brought attention to her use of the word “cyclopedia” in lieu of “encyclopedia.” This very conscious word choice reflects the themes of collective exploration, open mindedness, and evolution of thought that were present throughout her talk. She explained, “To me, cycling knowledge is different than encircling it. Cycling denotes a feedback loop of ideas and practices that circulate and travel in distinct orbits with definite points of semantic gravity. It also suggests a journey rather than a singular critical perspective…On the other hand, encirclement is a mental and political construct that allows all things to be incorporated into controllable and determined worldviews.”

This distinction is important because, as Kallipoliti stated in conclusion, “Ecology is not one thing. Like water, which exists in various material states and whose power can both instill and destroy life, ecological design comprises a universe of fragmented worldviews and their constellations. It is a cloud of stories about human and non-human agencies and the ways in which they encounter the Earth, correlate with its parts, nurture it, or are nurtured by it. It is enveloped by ghosts and ideas of what the world should be, engineered fantasy of interconnectedness of all things, circular reasoning, and the idealization of the natural.”