PhD Candidate, History and Theory of Architecture & Urbanism, Princeton SOA
MA, Princeton University (2017)
MArch, Rice University (2009)
BA, Vassar College, Political Science (2002)
Curt Gambetta is a PhD candidate in the History and Theory of Architecture and Urbanism at Princeton and is co-editor of Attention Audio Journal, a web-based architecture journal. Prior to joining the PhD program at Princeton, he was the Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning (2011-2012) and a teaching fellow at Woodbury University School of Architecture in Los Angeles (2012-2013). During the 2000's, he was a resident of the Sarai program of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) in Delhi, India (2002-03 and 2004-05), where he was involved in a number of initiatives in new media, including moderation of the Urban Study Group e-list, coordination of a digital archive of historical documents about urbanism in South Asia, and other projects.
Curt’s research interests include the history and anthropology of building materials, fieldwork in architectural history and practice, and the architecture and urbanism of infrastructures such as waste management and lighting. His dissertation project at Princeton is a history and ethnography of the substitution of materials and building technologies following Indian Independence in 1947 and economic liberalization in the 1980s and 90s. Curt's design and research practice has included a number of public installations and events. As part of his research project The Assembly of Trash, he co-organized a symposium (Producing Waste, Producing Space) and exhibition (Tracing Waste) at Princeton University (2015), undertook a residency (How To Make Waste Public) at WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles (2014), and curated an exhibition and symposium (The Assembly of Trash) at CEPA Gallery in Buffalo in 2012. In 2012, he designed a public installation at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, TX that imagined the infrastructure of office light in an outdoor urban space.
His recent publications include essays in Discourse (PUP, 2020), Interwoven (2017 and 2019), ARPA (2016) and Scapegoat (2011 and 2017). In 2012, he co-edited an issue of the Indian journal Seminar, Streetscapes: The Future of the Street, which drew from a symposium organized in collaboration with a group of scholars at the National Institute of Advanced Studies (NIAS) in Bangalore.
