The Climate of Architectural History and Theory: Olga Touloumi

The Climate of Architectural History and Theory is a series of daytime lectures from guest scholars presented by the Department of Architecture's History and Theory Committee.

Olga Touloumi will be speaking about her book "Assembly by Design: The United Nations and its Global Interior. How the United Nations headquarters became the architectural instrument and broadcast medium of global diplomacy." For almost seven years after World War II, a small group of architects took on an exciting task: to imagine the spaces of global governance for a new political organization called the United Nations (UN). To create the iconic headquarters of the UN in New York City, these architects experimented with room layouts, media technologies, and design in tribunal courtrooms, assembly halls, and council chambers. The result was the creation of a new type of public space, the global interior.

Olga Touloumi is an Associate Professor of Architectural History at Bard College. Her research concerns the role of architecture and media in 20th-century forms of liberal internationalism. Touloumi has coedited Sound Modernities: Architecture, Media, and Design, a special issue of The Journal of Architecture that investigates how acoustics and mass media, such as the radio and the telephone, transformed modern architectural culture during the 20th century; and Computer Architectures: Constructing the Common Ground, 1945-1980, a volume of essays about the exchanges between designers and technologists that shaped computational discourses and practices in European and North American institutions. She has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science and her research has been awarded fellowships and research grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities, Bard College, Harvard University, the Alexander S. Onassis Foundation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, and the Propondis Foundation. Touloumi is the cofounder of the Feminist Art and Architectural Collaborative (FAAC) and board member of the Center for Critical Studies in Architecture. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and a master of science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Before arriving at Bard, she taught architectural history at MIT and at Harvard University.

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