Making an Audience: Stories of Resistance and Transgression

Making an Audience is a lecture by Pooyan Ruhi about his work in/for Iran in the past ten years. Ruhi’s work has been focused on translating and editing history/theory books to establish a culture in which, as opposed to the existing culture in Iran, architecture is not merely a professional practice, but rather a disciplinary discourse. The lecture will be followed by a discussion between Ruhi and Iman Ansari about the role of books in the dissemination of discourse in contemporary architecture culture and some of the works and ideas presented in the lecture.

Pooyan Ruhi is an educator and editor. He is an alumnus of Pratt Institute (‘13) and SCI-Arc (MS Architectural Technologies ‘14, MS Design Theory and Pedagogy ‘17). His work is focused on histories and theories of education and radical architectural pedagogies. He has been the editor of several books, among them Paperless Studio: Columbia University Under Bernard Tschumi (2018), Peter Eisenman; Writings, Interviews, Debates (2019), Architecture and Object-Oriented Ontology (2020), and Against Ideology: An Escape Plan for Architecture (2023). Ruhi has taught workshops, design studios, and history/theory seminars in the US and Iran.

Iman Ansari is an architectural historian and designer. He is an Assistant Professorof Architecture at the Knowlton School and is a founding principal of AN.ONYMOUS. Ansari’s research explores architecture’s interactions with science, technology, and medicine in the modern era. He has contributed to multiple books and edited volumes on architectural history and theory, landscape architecture, and urbanism. His written work has appeared in Architectural Review, Architectural Theory Review, Architect’s Newspaper, Cabinet, Journal for the Society of Architectural Historians, Log, Metropolis,Places Journal, Room One Thousand, and Thresholds, among others. He has been a TEDx speaker and has lectured at institutions in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. Ansari holds a PhD from UCLA, an MAUD from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BArch from the City College of New York.