Fed up with permanent housing crisis and real estate greed? Join the co-founder of the LA Tenants Union and co-author of Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis for an in-depth discussion of the housing question and the resurgent tenant movement. Why do landlords claim the majority of our wages while they work only four hours a month? What if the housing crisis was a crisis of exploitation and domination? How can we turn the shared misery of paying rent into shared power to win the housing we deserve?

This event will include three parts: a contextualizing introduction to Nora Wendl’s book “Almost Nothing: Reclaiming Edith Farnsworth” (University of Illinois Press, 2025) by Professor Adrienne Economos-Miller; an illustrated reading of excerpts of this book by Wendl; and a conversation between Professors Wendl, Economos-Miller, and Sam Schuermann on the themes and topics of the book. Almost Nothing is a critical history of the Edith Farnsworth House (Mies van der Rohe, Plano, Illinois, 1951) written in the form of an auto-theoretical memoir. As such, it engages in topics and questions related to architectural historiography, feminism, preservation, memory, and authorship.

Commoning is the act of sharing and managing resources—cultural and natural—with minimal reliance on the market or state, and where each stakeholder has an equal interest. User-managed governance of the environments we inhabit—from land ownership, to buildings, to domestic spaces—enables residents to be key agents in how resources are distributed, valued, and maintained. This lecture will focus on a series of design experiments by THE OPEN WORKSHOP that explore a range of commons—both in type and scale—that use architecture to catalyze and frame the mechanisms for commoning.

French 2D will lecture about seeing and making together, negotiating authorship through collaborative processes that challenge traditional architectural narratives and approaching practice, research, and teaching through a situated frame. They will discuss housing, civic installations and textiles, all understood as both a process and a product of collective work, policy change, formal legibility and playfulness.

Nocturnal Medicine operates on the cultural soul. Founded in 2021 by Larissa Belcic and Michelle Farang Shofet, the trans-disciplinary collective has roots in landscape architecture, visual art, performance, and nightlife.

Maura Lucking is a historian of architectural modernism and the nineteenth century U.S. Her research studies design as the intersection of connected histories of race, craft, land, and labor. Jodi Melamed is professor of English and Race, Ethnic, and Indigenous Studies at Marquette University. For spring semester 2024 she served as the Norman Freehling Professor at the Institute for the Humanities at the University of Michigan.

ULTRAMODERNE is an award-winning architecture and design firm located in Berkeley, CA. Led by co—principals Aaron Forrest and Yasmin Vobis, the office creates buildings and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous.