Teresa Stoppani, AA History and Theory Studies Tutor, will present her lecture Unorthodox: Architecture as Paradigm, on Thursday 26 September at 6.30pm as part of the Preservation Lecture Series,  n initiative of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia GSAPP.

The lecture argues that when the history, representation, form and design of architecture are “broken”, and its relationship with nature is finally exposed and its edifice collapsed, then it is perhaps time to rethink architecture in different terms. In Unorthodox Ways, Stoppani argues that architecture and its processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and the urban, proposing them as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. This talk will reconsider paradigm (Greek paradèigma, ‘example, exemplar’) as an action and relation word that contains within itself the possibility of variation and movement. As an intellectual operation, paradigm works towards the production of a non-dialectical form of knowledge, which does not aim to achieve the universal and derive principles (rules) from it. Stoppani will argue that the architectural project performs in the city the relational operation of the paradigm, producing a form of knowledge that dismisses oppositions and resolutions.

Find out more on the Columbia GSAPP website