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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.

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.

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.

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.