Image: from Utopie: Texts and Projects 1967–1978 (Semiotext(e)and MIT Press, 2011).

Starting from the recent anthology of writings, Utopie: Texts and Projects 1967–1978 (Semiotext(e) and MIT Press, 2011), Buckley’s talk will focus on the production of the Utopie group, a collection of architects, urbanists, and sociologists that emerged in the cracks between several disciplines in the late 1960s. While the group’s collaboration is often seen as parallel to the simultaneous rise of interdisciplinarity within the academy and in large urban planning initiatives, for Utopie such a collaboration remained distinct from, and opposed to these larger institutional trends. The talk will reexamine the demands that such group formations placed upon the intellectual and pedagogical culture of architecture during the late 1960s in order to consider what its legacies may be today.

The talk will be followed by an open discussion moderated by Sara Knox Hunter of Summer Forum for Inquiry and Exchange. Conversation will then continue with a reception in the library and Graham bookshop where Utopie: Texts and Projects 1967–1978 and other related titles will be available for sale.

Craig Buckley teaches at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where he is also the Director of Publications. His research focuses upon relationships between architectural practice, new genres of publication, and politics in the postwar period. Recent books include Dan Graham’s New Jersey (coedited with Mark Wasiuta, Lars Müller Publishers, 2012), Utopie: Texts and Projects 1967-1978 (with Jean-Louis Violeau, Semiotext(e) 2011) and Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (with Beatriz Colomina, ACTAR Press 2010). His writing and criticism have appeared in the journals Anarchitekur, Log, October, and Perspecta, among others.

This event is co-sponsored by the Graham Foundation and Summer Forum for Inquiry and Exchange.

Summer Forum for Inquiry and Exchange seeks to nurture and facilitate conversation and creative exploration through an examination of contemporary texts. This year, participants will meet in New Harmony, Indiana for a one-week summer residency to engage in an extended dialogue centered on directed readings on the prescribed theme, "Community, Utopia, and the Individual."