Lecture: Pierre Belanger

Join us for a public lecture by Pierre Belanger, Open Systems, on Monday, Oct. 21, 2019.

Belanger’s lecture titled, “The Decolonization of Design,” will discuss the power of institutions in influencing architecture, engineering and planning for the past 800 years. Through this influence, these institutions have normalized colonial systems of spatial inequity and white supremacy through standards, surveys, specifications and signifiers. Belanger claims that this sense of racial discrimination, territorial injustice and environmental inhumanity should be broken. He proposes a series of counter-projects and retroactive strategies that suggest supporting “undesign” and “unplanning” via the transgression of structures of oppression.

Belanger is a trained landscape architect and urban planner based in Boston. He has published two books and written for the Harvard Design Magazine and Wet Matter. In addition, Belanger received the Canada Prix de Rome in Architecture and curated the Canada Pavilion and Exhibition EXTRACTION at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Belanger is currently an LAF Fellow for Innovation and Leadership, a practicing designer and co-founder of the Landscape Infrastructure Lab.

This lecture is funded by the Robert B. Church Memorial Lecture fund.

Unless otherwise noted, lectures begin at 5:30 p.m. in Rm. 109/McCarty Auditorium in the Art + Architecture Building, 1715 Volunteer Blvd. All are welcome.