HTC Experiments

Photograph by Dan Hill (City of Sound)

David Gissen is a historian and theorist of architecture and urbanism. He is associate professor (with tenure) of architecture and visual studies and coordinator of the  history/theory curriculum for architecture at the California College of the Arts. His recent work specifically focuses on developing a novel concept of nature in architectural thought and the parameters for an experimental form of practice in architectural history. He recently completed a manuscript on architectural environments that emerged during New York City’s so-called “crisis” years.

David is the author of the book Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environment (Princeton Architectural Press); editor of the issue of AD Magazine “Territory”; and editor of the book Big and Green (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003).

His essays and research are published in many academic journals including AA Files, AD Energies, Grey Room, Kerb, Log, Quaderns, Volume, Tarp, The Radical History Review, The Journal of Architecture, The Journal of Architectural Education, and Thresholds; magazines and newspapers Architectural Record, Architecture, Metropolis, Domus, ARCADE, Cabinet, Blueprint, Constructs, Singapore Architect, The Village Voice, Time Out: New York, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic; and books Ethics and Aesthetics (Venice Biennale, 2000), Models and Drawings (Routledge, 2007), Architectural Theory: 1871-2005 (Blackwell, 2008), Design Ecologies (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), Writing Urbanism (Routledge, 2008), The Ethics of Dust (TBA/Venice Biennale, 2009), The Religious Imagination in Modern Architecture: A Reader (Routledge, 2011), Air (MIT Press, 2011), Coupling (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011), Landform Building (Lars Mueller, 2011), Imperfect (Canadian Center for Architecture & Lars Mueller, 2012), Landscape Futures (Actar,  2012), Architecture is All Over (MIT Press, forthcoming, 2012) and Cycles (Actar, forthcoming, 2012).

His curatorial, experimental historical, and design work has been staged at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, National Building Museum, Yale Architecture Gallery, Maryland Institute College of Art, Toronto Free Gallery, The Museum of the City of New York, and the exhibition “Landscape Futures” at the Nevada Museum of Art.

Gissen lectures on his work internationally, including recent invited talks at Princeton University, Yale University, Harvard University, University of Waterloo, The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, University of Toronto, The Royal Danish Academy of Art, The Bartlett School of Architecture, The Humanities Center of the University of California Santa Barbara and “Postopolis!” LA, sponsored by The Storefront for Art and Architecture.

He studied architecture at the University of Virginia, Columbia University, Yale University, and received his PhD from the University College London under the direction of Matthew Gandy and Adrian Forty.

Contact at dgissen@cca.edu