Society of Fellows and Buell Fellows Sonali Dhanpal and Chelsea Spencer are organizing Making and Unmaking Property: A Public Symposium. The one-day conference will take place in person and online. Click here for more details and how to register.

About the Symposium

Architecture inscribes and reinscribes property regimes onto the surface of the earth. As tools of improvement and demarcation, buildings materialize otherwise abstract claims of property ownership. And in so doing, architecture also inaugurates the possibility of property destruction.

This symposium asks how property is made and unmade—not just through legal instruments or physical acts of seizure but also, crucially, through architectural objects and processes. It will bring together architectural historians with scholars of racial capitalism, colonialism, and law to illuminate new questions about how architecture and property are co-constituted across symbolic, social, spatial, and material registers. Presenters will address property’s making in actuarial assessment, hereditary compacts, domicile law, and the sedimentation of legal claims and property’s unmaking in sabotage, arson, and other acts of destruction.