Under the Influence: A Symposium

The Under the Influence book is based on the eponymous symposium, which brought together scholars and practitioners of architecture in order to focus on one of the most anxious disciplinary topics: influence. Influence is not easily quantified. It is elusive, even when we casually admit to it as we ogle images on the internet, or feel ourselves softening our resolve on an important issue in light of a beautifully crafted piece of rhetoric; or as the mass-media drone imperceptibly rewires some of our most fundamental desires. When Under the Influence symposium took place at MIT in 2012, the invitation to discuss issues of originality and copying in architecture were still taboo. There have been a number of projects on the topic since, but they have hardly exhausted the topics of copying and copyright, whose importance increases with every act of scrolling or “liking” architectural images on Instagram. Presented by the MIT Department of Architecture. With contributions by Ana Miljacki, Mario Carpo, Alexander D’Hooghe, Cristina Goberna, Urtzi Grau, Eric Höweler, Timothy Hyde, Florian Idenburg, Sam Jacob, Michael Kubo, Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Michael Meredith, Hilary Sample, Nader Tehrani, Enrique Walker, Ines Weizman, Meejin Yoon

Ana Miljački is a critic, curator and Associate Professor of Architecture at MIT, where she teaches history, theory and design and directs the MArch Program. Miljački was part of the three-member curatorial team, with Eva Frank i Gilabert and Ashley Schafer, of the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, where their Biennale project, titled OfficeUS, critically examined the last century of US architectural offices; their professionalization and their concomitant global contribution. Miljački’ s Un/Fair Use exhibition, co-curated with Sarah Hirschman was presented at the Center for Architecture in New York in 2015 and at UC Berkeley’s Wurster Gallery in 2016. In 2018 Miljački launched the Critical Broadcasting Lab at MIT. She is the author of The Optimum Imperative: Czech Architecture for the Socialist Lifestyle 1938-1968 (Routledge, 2017), and the editor of Terms of Appropriation: Modern and Architecture and Global Exchange with Amanda Reeser Lawrence (Routledge, 2018).