Cold War Space: Images, Territories, and Infrastructures
Team: Seçil Binboğa (Cass Gilbert Visiting Assistant Professor, Researcher), Fran Di Caprio (Master of Architecture Student, Cold War Space-Seminar Participant), Gina Hurtado (Bachelor of Design in Architecture/Urban Studies, Cold War Space-Seminar Participant)
Program: Architecture
How can one write an architectural history of a place where the Cold War has never ended? In what ways architecture’s visual techniques and analytics can be operationalized to understand the scalar dynamics of a war that is “cold in some spots and not so cold in others”? What can one learn from studying the infrastructures of warfare through the lens of architecture?
“Cold War Space” is an ongoing research project that seeks answers to these questions via two major dimensions of inquiry and analysis:
- The archival dimension refers to Seçil Binboğa’s book project in which she examines the United States-sponsored “war-by-development” in the Middle Eastern/Mediterranean regions, specifically in Turkey—a nation-state that welcomed the war-by-development as a means of resolving and displacing its internal political contradictions. Drawing on the national and local archives in the U.S. and Turkey, the researcher analyzes the visuality of American military-industrial design projects that radically altered the relations between nature, space, and territory.
- The pedagogic dimension refers to a seminar taught in the Fall of 2023, which offered multi-scalar case studies on the global Cold War, including mushroom clouds, do-it-yourself shelters, space capsules, and nuclear landscapes. As a final project, students created photo- and video essays, some of which, as the projects of Gina Hurtado and Fran Di Caprio illustrate in this exhibit, uncovered the legacy of the global Cold War that still shapes contemporary forms of spatial violence.
Keywords: visuality, warfare, scale
