MAR 16 | 4:00 PM | AB 100

On March 16, the Estopinal College of Architecture and Planning will welcome internationally recognized artist and scholar Jorge Otero-Pailos for a guest lecture titled The Ethics of Dust, at 4:00 p.m. in the Architecture Building, Lecture Hall 100.

In this lecture, Otero-Pailos will explore architecture through the traces it leaves behind—dust, pollution, sweat, water, smells, and fragments of buildings that refuse to stay fixed in time or place. Drawing from his groundbreaking Ethics of Dust series and other experimental preservation works, he reveals how these material residues tell powerful stories about culture, memory, and environmental urgency.

He will present selections from his Ethics of Dust series, featuring dust imprints taken from world heritage sites, alongside other “distributed monuments,” including sculptures made from unwanted architectural materials and fragments of monuments rescued from the scrapyard. His work invites architects, designers, and students to imagine futures rooted not only in innovation, but in mutual care, responsibility, and attention to what we often overlook.

 

BIO

Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Jorge Otero-Pailos is an architect, artist, and theorist specializing in experimental forms of preservation. He is the founder and editor of the journal Future Anterior, co-editor of Experimental Preservation (2016) author of Architecture’s Historical Turn (2010) as well as a contributor to scholarly journals and books including the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics and Rem Koolhaas’ Preservation Is Overtaking Us (2014). Jorge Otero-Pailos is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Puerto Rico, and has received awards from major art, architecture, and preservation organizations, including the Kress Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Fitch Foundation, the Canadian Center for Architecture, UNESCO, and the American Institute of Architects. He studied architecture at Cornell University and earned a doctorate in architecture at M.I.T.

Jorge Otero-Pailos’s work as an artist has been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, including Artangel’s public art commission at the UK Parliament, the Venice Art Biennial, Victoria and Albert Museum, Louis Vuitton Galerie Museum, Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, SFMoMA, Hong Kong’s Tai Kwun Centre for Heritage and Arts, Frieze London, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. He is the recipient of a 2021-22 American Academy in Rome Residency in the visual arts.
[Lifted from GSAPP faculty page: https://www.arch.columbia.edu/faculty/15-jorge-otero-pailos]

ECAP lectures are free and open to the public.
For more information contact caplectures@bsu.edu