“Spatial immensity beggars designation.”
– John R. Stilgoe

What does it mean to grapple with the immensity of the Americas? The third issue of “Manifest: A Journal of the Americas”, highlights propositions that have taken seriously the “bigger than big”: design and representational experiments aimed at narrating, framing, or enacting the American continent and the forms and ideas which it animates. In this event, Swati Chattopadhyay will unpack the notion of ‘connected histories’ and propose a strategy of smallness towards the decolonization of infrastructure on “Make no Big Plans”, while Rutger Huiberts and Evangelos Kotsioris will reflect on how the Voyager planetary program altered the perception of Earth’s scale and triggered the production of a compact cultural imaginary on “Voyager and the Expanding States of America”. Two of the journal’s founding editors, Anthony Acciavatti and Dan Handel, will contextualize the interventions as part of the editorial project that shapes Manifest, opening the response by current PhD candidates that will enter in conversation with the guest regarding the power of historical description and the capacity of independent publication as medium for conducting active research.

Image: The Voyager Golden Record, detail of the label for Side 1.

Anthony Acciavatti works at the intersection of architecture and the history of science and technology. A founding editor of Manifest, he is a principal of Somatic Collaborative in New York and the Daniel Rose Visiting Assistant Professor in Urban Studies at Yale University.

Dan Handel is an architect and curator working on research-based exhibitions and publications with a penchant for underexplored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments. He is a founding editor of Manifest.

Swati Chattopadhyay is Professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of California, Santa Barbara. An architect and architectural historian, she is the author of Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny (2005), Unlearning the City: Infrastructure in a New Optical Field (2012), and co-editor (with Jeremy White) of City Halls and Civic Materialism: Towards a Global History of Urban Public Space (2014) and Routledge Companion to Critical Approaches to Contemporary Architecture (2019). She is currently completing two book projects: A Geography of Small Spaces, and Nature’s Infrastructure: British Empire and the Making of the Gangetic Plains,
1760–1880. She is the founding editor of PLATFORM http://www.platformspace.net/

Rutger Huiberts is a New York-based architect with a background in urbanism. Rutger currently works for the New York office of KPF, after having worked for the London branch of the same firm. Previously, Rutger has worked for Rotterdam based offices MVRDV and Casanova Hernández Architects and Rajan Ritoe Architecture Urbanism-Infrastructure in Delft.

Evangelos Kotsioris is a New York-based architectural historian, educator and architect whose research focuses on the intersections of architecture with science, technology and media. He is currently a Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was the 2016–17 Emerging Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where he organized the exhibition Lab Cult: An unorthodox history of interchanges between science and architecture. His writing has appeared in Perspecta, New Geographies, The Architectural Review, Volume, Conditions, On Site and elsewhere.

Zoom Meeting Information:
https://aaschool.zoom.us/j/81870686205…
Meeting ID: 818 7068 6205
Passcode: 918940