Architecture and the Housing Question: A Book in Progress

Can Bilsel, Professor of Architecture, and
Juliana Maxim, Associate Professor and Director of the Architecture Program,
University of San Diego

Can Bilsel and Juliana Maxim will be talking to the Friends of San Diego Architecture about the genesis of their upcoming book, Architecture and the Housing Question (to be published in 2019 by Routledge Press in the United Kingdom). Their central concerns are to examine the mechanisms whereby architecture has come to frame the question of housing in its social and political implications, as well as the intersections between the architecture profession and the evolving discourses on habitation, modernization, welfare, and humanitarianism. The book features a critical introduction by editors Bilsel and Maxim, and a collection of case studies written by experts in contexts as diverse as Belgium, France, the Netherlands, the former Soviet Union, former Czechoslovakia, the United States, China, Algeria, Morocco, Turkey, and Somalia. The thematic organization of the collection offers a comparative history of architecture and highlights the methodological issues that underpin its global outlook.

Mr. Bilsel and Ms. Maxim were the recipients of a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts for their book. The Graham Foundation fosters the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society. In 2018, the Foundation awarded nearly $535,000 to 74 projects by individuals.

Juliana Maxim, Associate Professor and Director of the Architecture Program at the University of San Diego, is an art and architectural historian. Her work focuses on the history of modern aesthetic practices – from photography to urbanism – under the communist, centralized states of the former Soviet Bloc. More broadly, her focus is on the historiography of socialism. She also contributes critical essays about contemporary art and architectural practices on both sides of the US-Mexico border. Recent essays have appeared in journals such as Rethinking Marxism and Southeastern Europe, and in edited books such as Re-Humanizing Architecture. New Forms of Community, 1950-1970, and Watersheds: Poetics and Politics of the Danube River.

Maxim completed her Ph.D. dissertation at MIT in 2006 on the History, Theory and Criticism of Art and Architecture. She was a recipient of the National Council for East European and Eurasian Research Award (2008-2010) and was an American Council for Learned Societies post-doctoral fellow (2012-2013). Her forthcoming book titled The Socialist Life of Modern Architecture: Bucharest, 1955-1965 (Routledge), explores the remarkably intense and multifaceted architectural activity in postwar Romania and the mechanisms through which architecture was invested with political meaning.

Can Bilsel is Professor of Architecture at the University of San Diego. His research bridges the fields of the history and theory of modern architecture and urbanism, the history of archaeology and museum reconstructions, the history of architectural conservation, cultural theory, and postcolonial studies. He is the author of Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, published in 2012 by the Oxford University Press. His most recent article, “Crisis in Conservation: Istanbul’s Gezi Park Between Restoration and Resistance,” appeared in June 2017 in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. For nearly a decade Bilsel was the Chair of the Department of Art, Architecture and Art History, and he was the founding Director of the University of San Diego’s Architecture Program.

Bilsel has received numerous awards including the Aga Khan Fellowship at MIT, the Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities at Princeton University, and was a Fellow at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles for two consecutive years. In 2007 he was invited as a visiting scholar to the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. He served on the National Endowment for Humanities America’s Historical and Cultural Organizations Grant Panel in Washington D.C. in 2011. He also served on the scholarship selection committees of American Research Institute in Turkey and the Getty Villa in Los Angeles.