Preston H. Thomas Memorial Symposium
To challenge histories and memories displayed in public spaces, architecture must reckon with the ways in which its multiple dimensions across built, natural, and imaginary environments have been instrumental in perpetuating colonial narratives and materializing inequities. By acknowledging the violent dimensioning of architecture and its historically divisive power, we have the opportunity today to recognize how manifestations of architecture can be allied with spatial practices that center and embody scales of repair.

We have entered a new period for reconstructions: of self and nature, of cities and the planet. Imagining a future in which societies have the means to recover land and restore the climate, we may also prompt ideas for the repair of both human and nonhuman communities and their symbiotic cultural survival. Reparations should be at the forefront of design, thinking, and pedagogy.

Acts of Repair proposes an open series of roundtables on the restorative dimensions of architecture among practitioners across design, landscape, arts, curating, pedagogy and advocacy. We invite the public to share in thinking through concepts of repair and reconstruction that may open new visions of an ethical architecture, urbanism, and landscape. Bringing diverse voices and geographies into dialogue, each conversation will address the ways in which structural injustices can be acknowledged, and cultural, affective, and ecological bounds reconceived.

As a means for bringing compelling visual language into the conversation, WAI Think Tank was commissioned to create a collage titled Acts of Repair that appears as a mural pulling together the many scales, concerns, and lines of inquiry in question. Click here to view the animation of the mural.

The Preston H. Thomas series is funded through a gift to Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning from Ruth and Leonard B. Thomas of Auburn, New York, in memory of their son, Preston. The symposium events are free and open to the public.

Click here to register for the talks on April 16th.
Click here to register for the talks on April 20th.

Co-organized by Sean Anderson, Associate Curator at the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, and Paulo Tavares, visiting critic at the Cornell AAP Department of Architecture, lecturer at the University of Brasilia; coordinated by Elias Bennett (B.Arch. '20) and Oonagh Davis (B.Arch. '20).