Examining Cold War Politics, Indigenous Heritage, and Colonial Power through the Built Environment
People gathered in front of the Church of Almofala, probably on October 10, 1898, the date of the last mass. Found in the Brazilian National Institute of Historic and Artistic Heritage (IPHAN) Archives (Document F004121) for research by Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz.
Three students in Weitzman’s PhD in Architecture program—Rami Kanafani, Marco Salazar Valle, and Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz—will present their latest research at the PhD Symposium at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Scheduled for April 2–3, 2026, On the Edge of Legibility investigates the peripheries of architectural knowledge through four thematic lenses: translations, epochs, revelations, and inscriptions. The three scholars’ work exemplifies the diverse, globally-engaged research on history and theory under way in the Architecture PhD program.
In the Translations panel, Rami Kanafani will present "Track II" Architecture and the Cold War Politics of the New Age. The paper explores how "bottom-up" New Age tactics in the United States sought to bypass the rigid Cold War polarized world order in favor of global unity of humanity and break from modernity. Kanafani focuses on a summer workshop organized by Dulce Murphy and her husband, Michael Murphy, at the Lindisfarne Association in Colorado, where experiments in personal communication between American and Soviet citizens aimed to ease geopolitical tensions. By examining "Spacebridges" and the Grail Chapel of Lindisfarne, with their distinct references to Native American architecture, Kanafani illustrates how thinkers experimented with architecture for a spiritually interconnected planet.
An illustration from Guamán Poma de Ayala, Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno, (1615), 369, reads: “[¿]cay coritacho micunqui[?] este oro comemos”(Do you eat this gold? This gold we eat.) The 17th-century chronicle is being studied by Marco Salazar Valle.
Marco Salazar Valle joins the Epochs panel with his paper, Dealing with Inka Evidence: Indigenous Erasure and Resistance at the Margins of the Empire. Salazar Valle examines the construction of Ecuador's national narrative and the conflicting stances of Hispanic and Indigenous heritage. Centering on Andrade Marín’s Scientific Solar Museum, the research critiques how Inka and pre-Inka heritage was erased while reinterpreted through the lens of the nation-state's mestizo narratives due to its ambiguity. Salazar Valle argues that the modern interpretations of the ambiguous "territorial liminality" of the sixteenth century Northern Inka empire allow pre-Columbian and pre-Inkan knowledge to survive as a form of resistance against imperial and state-led co-option.
Within the Revelations panel, Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz will present Shells, Sand, and Spirits: The Church of Almofala in Brazil’s Northeast. Her work investigates a church in Almofala, buried and revealed by shifting sand dunes, using this phenomenon to explore the tensions between architecture and land, presence and erasure, truth and myth. De Queiroz tracks the church’s lifecycle as a mediator of colonial power, territorial claims, and the dispossession of the Indigenous Tremembé people. She reads architecture not as a static object but as a territorial mediator whose meaning is constantly remade through ritual, dispossession, repair, struggle, and cosmopolitical relations.
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