For his CIAU fellowship, Benjamin Gianni experimented with new mediums for image making, namely etching and chine collé.
Benjamin Gianni
I was awarded the SOM Foundation fellowship on the basis of some work I was doing to try to connect modernism as a style, ideology, and constructional system with vernacular architecture. I had just published a small book called Dice Thrown and had been awarded a Young Architects Award by the Architectural League of New York.
The SOM Foundation gave me the opportunity to try out a new medium for image making, namely etching and chine collé. The SOM Foundation linked me up with the art department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), where I had access to etching presses. In addition to the visual work, I spent a good deal of my time working on a paper called “Speculations on the Idea of the Demotic,” which, consistent with the era, drew on the work of Northrop Frye and Giambattista Vico to try to make connections between modernity and vernacular, “demotic” architecture. This was based on Frye’s ideas of the movement from the heroic through the hieratic to the demotic, and Vico’s proposition that all civilizations begin with theocracy and end in democracy (before the ricorso). These, in turn, were tied to larger ideas of historical dialectics from Hegel’s Philosophy of Aesthetics and Victor Hugo’s proposition that the book (literacy, the vulgate) would kill architecture. As might be evident from the description I was, at that point in my life, very interested in so-called grand unified theories.
Benjamin Gianni
is an Associate Professor in the Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University where he leads the Urbanism program. Gianni received a BA from the University of Pennsylvania and an MArch from Yale University. He served as Director of the School of Architecture at Carleton University from 1992–2000 and Director of the School of Information Technology from 2003–2006. Gianni’s research interests focus on the areas of housing and urban development. Of particular interest are (1) public housing constructed in the decades following WWII in Europe and North America, and its redevelopment from the 1990s onward, (2) urbanization, suburbanization, and the study of large-scale housing ensembles in contemporary China, questioning the legacy of modernism and its transposition to different cultural and temporal contexts, and (3) the redevelopment of informal settlements in China, India, and Africa, using design as a form of research to explore adaptable, culturally resonant, and market-friendly approaches to redevelopment. He is currently finishing a book on pre-WWII suburbanization in Pittsburgh, PA.
