Felicity Scott

Class of Fall 2013

Associate Professor of Architectural History and Theory, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation

Columbia University

Outlaw Territories: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counter-Insurgency, 1966-1979

In her Academy project, Outlaw Territory: Environments of Insecurity/Architectures of Counter-Insurgency, 1966-1979, under contract with Zone Books, Scott retraces the relations of architecture and urbanism to the interdependent conditions of human unsettlement and territorial insecurity. Here she refers to both the displacement of persons through migration, urbanization, environmental catastrophe, and warfare, as well as the material, environmental, psychological, and geopolitical transformations “brought on by post-industrial technologies and neoliberal capitalism.” Investigating the responses to the growing urban unrest in the developed and developing worlds, Scott revisits an era when the disciplines—including architecture – played a role in global environmental governance and the management of populations. The project thus traces an arc from the rise of Open Land communes and Earth People’s Parks—with their alternative technologies and practices of “voluntary primitivism”—to Nicholas Negroponte’s founding of the Architecture Machine Group at MIT and its relations to the management of urban minority populations and the computerization of modern warfare.

Felicity Scott is an associate professor and the founding director of the Program in Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. She is a founding co-editor of Grey Room, a quarterly journal of architecture, art, media, and politics published by MIT Press. Following her undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne, she received a master’s degree in architecture and urban design from Harvard University (1994) and a PhD from Princeton University (2001). Scott’s work probes the political and theoretical understandings of technological transformation within modern and contemporary architecture. In addition to articles on contemporary art and architecture, she is the author of Architecture or Techno-Utopia: Politics after Modernism (MIT, 2007), Living Archive 7: Ant Farm (ACTAR Editorial, 2008), and a new book manuscript, Cartographies of Drift: Bernard Rudofsky’s Encounters with Modernity. Scott is the recipient of grants and awards from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, the Clark Art Institute, Creative Capital/ Warhol Foundation, and J. Paul Getty Foundation.