School’s Out! #32 with Todd Reisz

In March, the guest speaker for School’s Out! was Todd Reisz. He is an architect and writer and lives in Amsterdam. His work examines the global practice of architecture, specifically how the architect circulates technologies and cultural narratives. His recent book Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores architecture’s packaging to sell Dubai on a global stage. He has also co-authored Building Sharjah (Birkhäuser, 2021), an archival investigation of the city’s vanishing twentieth-century landscape.

Todd wants to urge us to write urban histories about cities that don’t yet exist, because now might be already too late.

As always at School’s Out! the evening ended with the screening of a short movie handpicked by AFFR curator Jord den Hollander.

Programme

18:00 – 19:00 Doors open, drinks, bites and tunes
19:00 – 20:00 Talk by Todd Reisz + Q&A
20:00 – 20:30 Short film, selected by Jord den Hollander
20:30 – 22:00 Drinks, bites and tunes

About Todd Reisz
Todd Reisz is an architect and writer and lives in Amsterdam. His work examines the global practice of architecture, specifically how the architect circulates technologies and cultural narratives. His recent book Showpiece City: How Architecture Made Dubai (Stanford University Press, 2020) explores architecture’s packaging to sell Dubai on a global stage. He has also co-authored Building Sharjah (Birkhäuser, 2021), an archival investigation of the city’s vanishing twentieth-century landscape.

Reisz has served as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor in Design at Yale School of Architecture and as a guest faculty member at Harvard Graduate School of Design. From 2012 to 2017, he was the Rose Visiting Assistant Professor in Urban Studies at Yale. At OMA, Reisz led the office’s first entry at the Venice Architecture Biennial (2006) and edited Al Manakh (2007) and Al Manakh 2: Gulf Continued (2010), two definitive explorations of Arab cities in the Gulf region. His work has been featured in several Venice Architecture Biennials, the Istanbul Design Biennial, Sharjah Biennial 13, and publications such as the Guardian, Perspecta, Log, Jadaliyya, Architectural Design, and Artforum.