The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment presents Why the Vernacular Today?, the inaugural forum launching the Institute’s multiyear research project on the vernacular. Bringing together perspectives from architecture, history, curatorial practice, and anthropology, the forum asks what vernacular building cultures might reveal about how we inhabit the world today, and how we might live otherwise.
Across the world, architects working in vastly different contexts are returning to vernacular building forms, traditional construction techniques, and materials that predate modern industrialization, seeking new ways to address the challenge of how to build on a fragile planet today. These traditions, shaped by generations of experience in particular places, reflect diverse ways of inhabiting and negotiating an environment shared by humans and other species. They offer more than formal inspiration or technical precedents: they invite us to reconsider how architecture helps shape the social, cultural, and ecological worlds we inhabit.
What explains this renewed interest in the vernacular, and what can we genuinely learn from it? How do we engage its knowledge and practices without exoticizing its forms or romanticizing the past? And what does it mean to look backward at a moment of profound environmental and social uncertainty? Rather than seeking easy answers in tradition, the forum approaches the vernacular as a site of critical inquiry, asking what its histories, contradictions, and possibilities might teach us about imagining different futures.
Participants:
Barry Bergdoll is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History at Columbia University, where he has been a faculty member since 1985. A specialist in the history of modern architecture, he served from 2007 to 2014 as Chief Curator of Architecture and Design at MoMA, where he curated or co-curated Mies in Berlin (2001), Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling (2008), Bauhaus 1919–1933: Workshops for Modernity (2009–10), Rising Currents: Projects for New York’s Waterfront (2009–10), Henri Labrouste: Structure Brought to Light (2013), Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955–1980 (2015), and Frank Lloyd Wright at 150: Unpacking the Archive (2017), among other exhibitions. He organized exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay and the Caisse des Monuments Historiques in Paris, the Centre Canadien d’Architecture in Montréal, and the Banamax Foundation in Mexico City. He is the author of the widely used textbook European Architecture: 1750-1890 (2000) in the Oxford History of Art series and monographs on Emilio Ambasz, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Mies van der Rohe, Léon Vaudoyer, and the editor of Marcel Breuer: Building Global Institutions (2017). He is at work on a volume on the history of exhibiting architecture, derived from the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2013.
Erica Papernik-Shimizu is an associate curator in the Department of Media and Performance at MoMA. A founding member of the department, she works collaboratively to shape best practices for the stewardship and display of the Museum’s collection of time-based art. Her recent exhibitions include Shana Moulton: Meta/Physical Therapy (2024), Gallery 204: Michael Smith’s Government Approved Home Fallout Shelter Snack Bar (2023–26), Shigeko Kubota: Liquid Reality (2021), Tony Oursler: Imponderable (2016, with Stuart Comer), and Images of an Infinite Film (2013–14). She has contributed to such exhibitions as Carolee Schneemann: Kinetic Painting (2017–18), Harun Farocki: Images of War at a Distance (2011–12), and Marina Abramović: The Artist Is Present (2010–11). She holds an MA from University College London and a BA from the University of Michigan.
Mariam Issoufou is an architect from Niger. In 2014, she founded Mariam Issoufou Architects, a research-based practice whose designs are creative responses to identity, place, and history. With offices in Niamey and New York, the firm’s completed projects in Niger include the Hikma Community Complex, Niamey 2000, and Dandaji Regional Market. Upcoming projects include the Yantala Office in Niger, the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development in Liberia, and the Bët-bi Museum in Senegal. The practice has received the 2017 Gold LafargeHolcim Award for Africa and Middle East and the 2018 Silver Global LafargeHolcim Award for Sustainable Architecture, as well as being shortlisted for an Aga Khan Award in 2023. The practice has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021, 2023, and was commissioned to redesign the biennial’s Rolex Pavilion in 2025. Issoufou’s holistic approach to architecture and sustainability has earned her several honors. She is a Prince Claus Laureate, was named one of the 15 Creative Women of Our Time by The New York Times, and the UN awarded her the 2025 Champion of the Earth Award for her work in sustainability and social equity.
Han Li and Yan Hu are founding partners of Drawing Architecture Studio, a cross-disciplinary practice established in Beijing in 2013. Their work spans architectural drawing, spatial design, urban studies, and artistic creation, using diverse media to explore the cultural articulation of architecture. Their projects have been exhibited internationally at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale, and Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. The studio’s work is held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and M+ in Hong Kong. Its awards include the DAM Architectural Book Award (2021), WAF Drawing Prize (2018), and RIBA Journal Eye Line Drawing Award (2016). Both Han Li and Yan Hu are visiting professors at Syracuse University’s School of Architecture.
Pablo Landa Ruiloba is an anthropologist who specializes in architecture. He earned his PhD from Princeton and his BA from Yale. Since 2023, he directs Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México’s Museo Experimental el Eco in Mexico City. Before, he was head of libraries and archives at UNAM’s School of Architecture. His projects include Arquitectura Popular del Noreste, which documents vernacular architecture in northern Mexico, and Nuevo Norte, which facilitates research and collaborations among artists, architects, and designers and migrants in Mexico. He has curated exhibitions such as Mexico’s pavilion in the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, on social and participatory architecture; Mario Pani, arquitectura en proceso (MARCO 2014 and Museo Amparo 2016), and Atlas de Arquitectura Contemporánea en México (Museo Amparo 2025 and Museo Nacional de Arquitectura 2026). He is a member of Fundación de Arquitectura Tapatía Luis Barragan, where he leads the committee overseeing its archives.
This event was made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.