This event will be conducted in-person in the Frederick P. Rose Auditorium and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here. 
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

The Making Home lecture series at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of The Cooper Union presents four free public lectures featuring Making Home—Smithsonian Design Triennial exhibition participants paired with designers, artists, professionals, and Cooper Union faculty discussing the exhibition’s exploration of home and its relation to design, data, justice, history, and building. 

For the third event in the lecture series, Making Home with History, multidisciplinary artist La Vaughn Belle and architect Germane Barnes will discuss cultural and environmental heritage in relation to their ongoing work and Triennial commissions. Both Belle and Barnes investigate Afro-diasporic social and historical narratives influencing contemporary art, architecture, and design. 

Belle’s work focuses on the often-forgotten colonial narratives embedded in the architecture and material culture of contemporary society. Her Triennial installation, The House That Freedoms Built, presents three fretwork-adorned structures inspired by the shapes of 18th-century houses built by formerly enslaved people on Saint Croix, set in dialogue with the Georgian Revival exterior of the  Carnegie Mansion. 

Barnes’ research and design practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity. For the Triennial, he designed sound stations inspired by the craft of Gullah sweetgrass baskets as part of the Artists in Residence in Everglades’ (AIRIE) Ebb and Flow installation in the museum’s conservatory. The installation articulates the cultural and environmental heritage of the subtropical ecosystem of the Everglades, which is under threat from urban development and the climate crisis. 

During the conversation, we will hear more about how they each approach structure, form, and research to examine these histories. The conversation will be moderated by Kayla Montes de Oca, associate professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. 

La Vaughn Belle (Born 1974, Tobago, Trinidad and Tobago; active Saint Croix, United States Virgin Islands) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the often-forgotten colonial narratives embedded in the architecture and material culture of contemporary society. Her practice frequently centers on the Caribbean island of Saint Croix—long claimed as a territory by various European nations, including nearly 200 years as a colony of Denmark, before being sold to the US in 1916. 

Germane Barnes is the principal of Studio Barnes, and associate professor and Director of the Master of Architecture Graduate Program at the University of Miami School of Architecture. Barnes’ practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining architecture’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation. His work has recently been exhibited in the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America, and the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial. He is a winner of the Architectural League Prize and is a Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. He was selected in the inaugural cohort of The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada. His work has also been featured and acquired to the permanent collections of international institutions most notably San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, The New York Times, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture. His project, Griot, was widely published, as a participant in Biennale Architettura 2023, Laboratory of the Future. 

Kayla Montes de Oca (moderator) is a design researcher and educator from Miami, Florida, based in New York City. Her research examines how policy and design shape communities over time, focusing on how individuals sustain tradition, build legacy, and navigate the power of place in collective memory and identity. Montes de Oca is currently an associate professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. She has a background in architecture with a Bachelor’s in Architecture from The Cooper Union and a Master’s in Design Studies from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. 

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.