Architecture is a spatial performance that can engage space-making and the idea of liberation as a spatial practice—much as Michel Foucault said that liberty is a practice. In this talk, Gooden explores how relationships between architecture and performance liberate otherness and challenge the hegemony of Western thought and cultural imagination.

Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and sole principal of Huff + Gooden Architects. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, speaking, performance, and education advocacy in the pursuit of spatial and social justice. Gooden is also a Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation of Columbia University where he is a co-director of the Global Africa Lab (GAL). He teaches advanced architectural design and theory at Columbia University where his studios focus on performance and cultural theory relative to global topics. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press) published in 2016.

Image: Harlem Now: Architecture and Its Ghosts (model view), 2017. Courtesy Mario Gooden