This event will be conducted in person in room 314F and Zoom.

For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urbanrenewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness.

In this event NoT[?] STUDIO students and teachers bring Jack Halberstam into conversation with Nora Akawi and Michael Young about Halberstam's recent book Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto.

Situated among the work of NoT[?] STUDIO students engaging contingent spatial practices of Lower East Side mutual aid and anarchist organizations, the conversation invites participants to think with Halberstam's new lexicons for transformation and their significance for architectural practice and learning.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He has written extensively ongender variance, queer theory, and visual culture, authoring several highly influential books including Female Masculinity, In A Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure, and Trans: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance*. His most recent publication is Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto. A widely recognized public scholar, Halberstam received the 2018 Arcus/Places Prize, was named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow, and was the subject of the 2022 short film So We Moved by Adam Pendleton.

Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect and Assistant Professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. She focuses on erasure and bordering in settler colonialism and works at the intersection of architecture with border studies, cartography, and archive theory.

Michael Young is Dean and Associate Professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union, and a founding partner of Young & Ayata.

Malin Heyman and James Hamilton are co-founders of the Stockholm based practice AT–HH and visiting faculty at The

Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union where they lead the fourth year design studio No Thing / NoT[?] STUDIO.

This event is open to current Cooper Union students, faculty, and staff. Room 314F. Members from the public may attend the lecture via Zoom. Registration is required.