UCLA AUD Spring 2025 Events: Timothy Hyde, "Striking Gold: A Brief History of American Architecture," with reception honoring Sebastiano Fabbrini (PhD '18)

April 24, 2025, 5:30 pm, Perloff Hall Decafe

"Striking Gold" offers an oblique history of architecture’s participation in America’s continental project. Traversing from village greens of New England to gold rush fields of California, to mountain plateaus in Wyoming and reclaimed marshland in Washington DC, it explores the ways in which American architecture has been constituted not by style but by myriad incremental conversions of value, material, and form.

This lecture will be followed by a reception celebrating the life and work of Sebastiano Fabbrini, PhD '18 (1990 - 2024).

Timothy Hyde is Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at MIT. His research examines architecture’s participation social and political realms from the eighteenth century to the present, with a particular attention to relationships of architecture and law. His most recent book, Ugliness and Judgment: On Architecture in the Public Eye (Princeton University Press, 2019), explores episodes in aesthetic debates on architecture and ugliness in Great Britain over the past three centuries to reveal the ways in which architectural discourse participated in the legal formulations of social techniques of the modern city. He is also the author of Constitutional Modernism: Architecture and Civil Society in Cuba, 1933-1959 (University of Minnesota Press, 2012), and numerous writings that have appeared in journals including Perspecta, Log, El Croquis, The Journal of Architecture, the Journal of Architectural Education, arq, Future Anterior, Architecture Theory Review, and Thresholds. These writings cover a breadth of topics from Henry Thoreau’s cabin to research stations in Antarctica.