This symposium builds on and extends the research into architecture’s entanglements with technologies of automation presented in Work, Body, Leisure—the Dutch Pavilion at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale. The symposium returns to the long 20th century to ask what histories might be told of this nexus, including, for instance, how the logics of automation have implicated not only able or privileged bodies in the so-called Global North but also “other” and “othered” bodies, and their forms of life, in broader geographical and geopolitical contexts. The symposium will ask how to view and trace the impact and historical interconnections of technologies, social ideals, and legal and computational protocols that have managed humans, their time, their labor, and their behavior.

Organized by the Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices program, Columbia GSAPP in collaboration with the Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Storefront for Art and Architecture.