Ross Exo Adams

Primary Academic Program: Architecture

Academic Program Affiliation(s): Environmental and Urban Studies, Experimental Humanities

Biography:

Ross Exo Adams is an architect and urban historian whose work draws on histories of urbanization, geography, politics, technologies, and environments to understand the relations between power and space that persist at their intersection. His book, Circulation and Urbanization (Sage, 2019), is a spatial history of the concept of circulation. It maps the ways in which this notion helped animate early modern and modern political ideas while at the same time giving shape to emerging spaces of the world. Through this lens, it argues that the urban is a uniquely modern space and process (urbanization) which, while drawing on early modern colonial spaces and structures of control, first became legible and reproducible over the course of the 19th century. Stemming from this historical research, Ross’s work has long focused on critically engaging the contemporary interrelations of ecology, nature, infrastructure, landscape, and urbanism that have formed under the broader frameworks of sustainability, ecological urbanism, and resilience. His current work draws on both contemporary material and historical inquiry in order to hone in on emerging modes in which the human body is drawn into relations with urban space. Expanding on histories of gender, race, and the fabrication of difference, this project explores how the production of space, of technologies, infrastructures, landscapes, and environments always involves the coproduction of bodies. He has written and presented widely on these bodies of work, and his writings have been published in edited volumes, such as Platform Urbanism and Its Discontents, Territory beyond Terra, Landscape and Agency, Infrastructure Space, Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, The Architecture of Closed Worlds, and scholarly and public journals including Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, e-flux Architecture, The Avery Review, Architectural Histories, Architecture and Culture, Volume, Log, Radical Philosophy, ArchDaily, Aggregate (forthcoming), and Journal of Architectural Education (forthcoming), among others. His work has been featured in the Venice Biennale of 2021 (Austrian Pavilion, Turkish Pavilion, Italian Pavilion) and 2014 (Swiss Pavilion), Storefront for Art and Architecture, and other public venues.

Ross’s research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Royal Institute of British Architects, London Consortium, Iowa State University, and MacDowell. Prior to joining Bard, he taught architecture and urbanism at Iowa State University, the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL; Architectural Association; Berlage Institute in Rotterdam; and the University of Brighton (UK). As an architect and urban designer, Ross has practiced with, among others, Productora DF, Mexico; Foster and Partners and Arup Urban Design, United Kingdom; and MVRDV, Netherlands. Since 2016, he has been reviews editor for The Journal of Architecture (RIBA).

BS, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; MArch, Berlage Institute, Rotterdam; PhD, London Consortium. At Bard since 2019.

 

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