Intra-Disciplinary Seminar Public Lecture: Tao DuFour AR'02

Tuesday, October 31, 2017, 7 - 8pm

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The Intra-Disciplinary Seminar (IDS) Public Lecture Series presents a lecture by Tao DuFour AR'02 entitled "A Somatology of Space." It is free and open to the public.

This lecture presents a phenomenological and ethnographic account of corporeity and the experience of spatiality. It explores ethnography as a method for describing spatial experience; the method rests on certain assumptions regarding the ontology of the body, and a phenomenology of perception is thus necessary for clarifying this methodological and experiential dependency. The ethnographic and philosophical problem will be introduced and interrogated from the point of view of contemporary theoretical paradigms in Brazilian anthropology and the phenomenology of the body; it will be supplemented by extracts of an exemplary spatial ethnography of ritual practice. 

Tao DuFour is a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. His work explores the overlaps between architecture, anthropology, and philosophy, building on his doctoral research on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. His current research is concerned with the question of architecture’s embeddedness in environmental histories, with a focus on the ‘late’ socialist context of Cuba. DuFour held the Rome Prize in Architecture at the British School at Rome (British Academy) was the Architecture Fellow at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has a Ph.D. and M.Phil. in the History and Philosophy of Architecture from Cambridge University (UK) and a B.Arch. from The Cooper Union. He is a registered architect in the UK (RIBA). DuFour has exhibited work in New York, Rome, Toronto, Cambridge, Milwaukee, at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Bibliowicz Family Gallery, Cornell University, and most recently with Iulia Statica at the Exhibition of the Shortlisted Projects for the Romanian Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 at Ion Mincu University Architecture and Urbanism Gallery and the Cotroceni National Museum, Bucharest. DuFour’s book, Husserl and Spatiality: Toward a Phenomenological Ethnography of Space, is forthcoming (Routledge, 2019).

The IDS Public Lecture Series, organized by Leslie Hewitt and Omar Berrada, consists of lectures by artists, theorists, activists, designers, writers, curators and other practitioners involved in the arts from positions that embody an interdisciplinary approach or that imply new uses for disciplinary traditions. 

The IDS Public Lecture Series is part of the Robert Lehman Visiting Artist Program at The Cooper Union. We are grateful for major funding and support from the Robert Lehman Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

Located in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium, at 41 Cooper Square (on Third Avenue between 6th and 7th Streets)

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