Please join us Thursday, March 31st at 5 pm as Hadas Steiner presents
“Birds and Biotopes”
“Birds and Biotopes” is a work in progress that studies the significance of ornithology for the development of an environmental theory of habitat. Early to emerge from the fragmentation of the natural sciences, the study of birds was the setting for major theoretical debates in the history of science. Ornithologists, in turn, were among the first to argue the case for modernist reforms to housing design. The colloquium will focus on the example of the popular British Birds by Thomas Bewick (1797/1804), as well as the way in which milieu was represented in the context of that book, en route to understanding the observation of the human, and ultimately built, environment. This study is part of a larger prehistory of the contributions of avian biologists to the field of ecological science, entitled The Accidental Vistant, which will demonstrate the shift from regional models of the environment to ones that accommodated global information networks.
Hadas A. Steiner is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, who researches cross-pollinations of technological, scientific and cultural aspects of architectural fabrication. She is at work on a manuscript that will provide an historical analysis of the evolving use of ecological terms in architectural discourse. Steiner is the author of Beyond Archigram: The Technology of Circulation (Routledge) and her scholarship and reviews have been published in OCTOBER, Grey Room, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of Architecture and arq. Her work has been supported by grants and fellowships from, among others, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Graham Foundation, Getty Research Institute, and the Zoological Society of London.
RSVP is required. Papers will be pre-circulate a week before each session. Please email Megan Eardley (meardley@princeton.edu) for a copy of the paper.
All events to take place at 5:00pm, N107
School of Architecture
Princeton University
Convened by Carson Chan, Martin Cobas, Megan Eardley, Curt Gambetta, and Elis Mendoza.
With kind support from:
Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism & the Humanities
Program in American Studies
Program in Media + Modernity
Program in Latin American Studies
Race and Citizenship in the Americas Network
