Building Life: Spatial Politics, Science, and Environmental Epistemes (Nov. 10-11 2023) is a two-day symposium organized by Esther Choi and Spyros Papapetros that examines how entanglements between the interdisciplinary fields of the built environment and the sciences have transformed concepts of nature, territory, and the environment over time, reproducing global inequities that continue to (un)build life. The symposium will feature an array of scholars and practitioners whose work is reshaping our understanding of what it means to inhabit, study, and care for a climate-changed world.
Building Life is co-presented by Princeton University and The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment at The Museum of Modern Art.
Free and open to the public. Registration is required. For program information and to register, visit soa.princeton.edu.
Public Service is a new web zine created by Esther Choi that centers BIPOC artists, designers and storytellers in conversations about radical change within the culture industries–and beyond.
View Episode 1: Representation Métiers here.
Featuring:
Angela Dimayuga
Andrew Thomas Huang
Anamik Saha
with
Death Angel
Ron Allen
Christy Essien-Igbokwe
Stuart Hall
Office Hours is included in E-flux Architecture's "Feminist Spatial Practices, Part 1" by Bryony Roberts and Abriannah Aiken.
Esther will deliver a talk at the the University of Indiana on March 23, 2023.
Esther will participate in UIC School of Architecture’s conference This is Not Contemporary on March 16–17, 2023.
Le Corbuffet is featured in Tatler Asia. Read "5 Artists Who Are Also Masters In the Kitchen."
Esther photographed still lifes inspired by Singapore’s Peranakan culture for the Winter travel issue of T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Esther is a recipient of a What Can We Do? (WCWD?) microgrant presented by the Asian American Arts Alliance. WCWD? is a micro-grant opportunity for artists looking to support the AAPI community in NYC with engaging, creative projects rooted in care. This program is made possible with support from the Asian American Federation.
Esther contributed to the "Keywords" section of the newest issue of PIN-UP Magazine.
Esther is the recipient of a 2022 Getty/ACLS Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Esther contributed a chapter to Radical Pedagogies, a collection of experiments in architectural education in the post–World War II era that challenged and transformed architectural discourse and practice. Edited by Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris and Anna-Maria Meister, the book explores how new forms of learning transformed architectural education in the decades after World War II to defy architecture's status quo. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and conventional assumptions about the nature of architecture as much as they challenged modernist and colonial norms, decentered building, imagined new roles for the architect, and envisioned participatory forms of practice. Although many of the experimental programs were subsequently abandoned, terminated, or assimilated, they nevertheless helped shape and in some sense define architectural discourse and practice.
Esther contributed an essay to "Solicited: Proposals", a project about architecture exhibitions by E-Flux Architecture and ArkDes.
Esther spoke with Jarrett Fuller on Scratching the Surface, a podcast about design, theory, and creative practice..
Esther will be giving a talk as part of the Architectural Association's New Models lecture series.
Thursday 14 October 2021
Time: 6:00pm - 7:30pm BST / 1:00pm - 2:30pm EST
Click to register for the online event.
Read a conversation between Esther and Sumayya Vally of Counterspace on Deem Journal.
Esther and Office Hours are featured in the September/ October issue of Dwell Magazine.
Esther discussed Office Hours in Architect Magazine.
Esther was interviewed about Office Hours in El Pais. Read "Racismo y fluidez de género en el mundo del diseño y arquitectura" here.
Esther participated in a panel on "Kinship and Advocacy" with Marie Louise Richards and Charlotte Malterre Barthes, moderated by Elise Misao Hunchuck, as part of Archipelago: Architectures of the Multiverse, convened by Vera Sacchetti.
Esther will deliver a brief lecture as the inaugural recipient of the David B. Brownlee Dissertation Award conferred by the Society of Architectural Historians on May 6, 2021. A roundtable conversation with SAH Second Vice President Carla Yanni and SAH Graduate Student Advisory Committee member Jessica Varner will follow. Sign up for the Brownlee Dissertation Award Roundtable event here.
WRITING AS CRITICAL PRAXIS
For the third event in the ongoing series of research methods-based discussions, CE+ has partnered with LUNCH, UVA School of Architecture’s student-run design journal, to explore the evolving practices of writing, editing, and publishing as vital forms of critical inquiry and powerful tools in projecting new futures for the built environment. In the spirit of CE+’s interdisciplinary approach to scholarly research and LUNCH’s role publishing a broad variety of theory, history, criticism, experimentation, design, and artwork each year, we will be discussing the role of writing as a critical praxis with artist and architectural historian Esther Choi and design critic Alexandra Lange.
THURSDAY APRIL 8
5PM - 6.30PM (ET)
Register for the event here.
Centering BIPOC Voices in Design, presented by Design Miami/
Hosted by Gillian Choi
with Malene Barnett, Esther Choi, Jerome AB, Asad Syrkett.
Join Jillian Choi of Design Miami/ and friends for a conversation on challenging racial prejudices in the design industry as well as questions from BIPOC audiences. All are welcome to listen.
Esther will be delivering an artist talk at Texas State University on April 7, in tandem with her solo exhibition Modern Societies I currently on view at TXST Galleries until April 11, 2021. Register for the talk here.
Esther will be delivering a talk as part of the "Racism, Classism, and the Constructed Environment" lecture series at Parsons The New School on March 30, 2021. Register here.
Texas State Galleries will be screening Modern Societies I online for a limited period. View the piece here.
Le Corbuffet is featured in 032C’s Confinement Kitchen series. Read “Feast On Your Modernist Heroes With Esther Choi’s Le Corbuffet.”
Esther recorded a sculpture and photography workshop for Wide Rainbow, a free 501c3 non-profit based in NYC that connects contemporary artists to youth. Please consider making a donation to support Wide Rainbow.
Choi's single-channel video installation, Modern Societies I, curated by Margo Handwerker, opens on Tuesday, Jan. 19th at Texas State Galleries.
Office Hours is featured in Architectural Digest. Read "A Grassroots Mentorship Program Aims to Break Down Industry Barriers."
Le Corbuffet is featured in Room Diseño. Read “Le Corbuffet de Esther Choi. Recetario artístico para comer arquitectura" here.
Office Hours is featured in Architizer. Read "Office Hours is Shifting the Landscape of BIPOC Creatives."
Esther will be delivering a talk to the McGill Architecture Student's Association on Thurs. Sept. 24.
Esther delivered a talk about climate change and indifference to the Cooper Climate Coalition at The Cooper Union in July. You can listen to the talk here.
Esther will be delivering a Zoom talk about Le Corbuffet as part of The Glass House Presents: an ongoing series of talks, performances, and other live events that extend the site’s historic role as a gathering place for artists, architects, and other creative minds.
July 13, 7pm EST | Register here
Esther contributed a short talk entitled, "At the Edge of Everything Else (Myths of Singularity)" to From Here; For Now: a series of 36+ online short lectures by artists and designers over 3 weekly sessions hosted by the Melbourne School of Design. You can watch the series here.
Esther was invited by T: The New York Times Style Magazine to create photographs using objects in her immediate surroundings that conjured comfort while under self-isolation during the pandemic. Read the piece and interview by Michael Snyder here.
Le Corbuffet was selected as one of the AIGA's 50 best books and cover designs of last year. The 2019 winning selections will become a part of a permanent, accessible, and historic collection of notable graphic design in the AIGA Design Archives. The books become part of the AIGA collection at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University. Congratulations to Studio Lin on this wonderful recognition!
Le Corbuffet has been nominated for a 2020 James Beard Foundation Book Award for photography. Truly thrilled to be in such good company.
J.J. Charlesworth reviews Le Corbuffet in Art Review.
Esther will be giving an online lecture entitled "The Unsustainable Sublime" on Wednesday, April 15 (5PM PST/ 8PM EST) as part of the HOPES Conference hosted by the University of Oregon. You can register for the webinar and conference here.
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“The Unsustainable Sublime" is a scholarly polemic that explores the sense of impasse that has come to characterize architecture’s inaction towards the issue of climate recuperation. The paper argues that the field’s inertia is in direct proportion to its allegiance to a logic of neoliberalism that is inherently at odds with the aims of more equitable socioecological endeavors, such as the Green New Deal. Such logic supports the belief that the vast, complex reach of climate change can only be tackled through measures of exceptionalism, while it also subsumes any local attempts at amelioration as opportunities to generate capital. What results through this cognitive dissonance is a counterfactual image that renders knowledge, rhetoric and aesthetics as powerless social tools in the fight against climate change, despite the countless examples throughout history that have proven otherwise.
Esther was interviewed by Cathy Erway for the podcast "Eat Your Words" on Heritage Radio Network. Listen to the interview here.
Le Corbuffet is included on Saveur Magazine's list of the season's best books.
With the rise of popular feminism, the unequal status of women in architecture has become a familiar topic typically centered on identifying quantitative imbalances in the profession: from issues of unequal pay and licensure, to voids in scholarship or representation. Yet beyond drawing awareness to these omissions, how might a discourse of gender parity move beyond numbers to consider the relationship between sexism and other forms of discrimination in the design fields in more nuanced, interconnected and multifaceted ways?
Assemble co-founder Jane Hall’s recently released book, Breaking Ground: Architecture by Women (Phaidon, 2019)—a ground-breaking visual survey of architecture designed by women from the early 20th century to the present day— acts as the pivot point for a timely conversation about navigating the complex terrain of gender identity and architecture through an intersectional approach. Hall will be interviewed by artist and architectural historian Esther Choi, as they discuss the pitfalls and pathways for feminist scholarship and activism in the architectural profession. An audience Q&A will follow.
March 5, 2020
Bard Graduate Center, 38 West 86th Street, New York City
6:30 – 8:00 pm
Free, but space is limited
Esther Choi sat down to discuss Le Corbuffet with Whitney Mallett for PIN-UP Magazine. Read the article here.
IN PRINT: 032c's Issue #37 (Winter 2019/20) includes Le Corbuffet in their favourite books of the season:
"Choi pushes the politics, but it's the ritualism of the idea that really stands out. In his 1890 comparative study of religion and magic The Golden Bough, James Frazer demonstrated that almost every society has a ritual, cover or overt, of theophagy--the sacramental eating of one's god(s). From Dionysiac feasts to the Christian Eucharist, one way to connect to the power of your deity or ancestor has always been to swallow them. By making an actual meal out of the elders of modernism, of the giants of the 20th-century avant-garde, Le Corbuffet is an atavistic communion."
Le Corbuffet is included in Eye Magazine, the international review of graphic design.
Esther will be delivering a lecture at the University of Tennessee Knoxville on Feb. 10. More information can be found here.
Esther is part of a group show entitled "Fulfilled" at Ohio State Knowlton School of Architecture, curated by Ashley Bigham.
Le Corbuffet is featured in the German edition of Architectural Digest.
The Robb Report heralds Le Corbuffet as "one of the weirdest coffee table books this year." Read the article here.
Changes of State, a performance created by Esther Choi and Anthony Acciavatti, is featured in the newly released publication Where Will the Water Come From: One Year of Water Futures. The catalogue accompanies the year-long exhibition Water Futures curated by Jane Withers at A/D/O.
Esther Choi was interviewed by Frances Anderton, host of the show DnA on KCRW in Los Angeles. Read more about the conversation and listen to it here.
Le Corbuffet is included in the Architect's Newspaper's "must-reads for this fall."
Le Corbuffet has won the national award in the Photography category of the 2020 Gourmand World Cookbook Awards. The book will represent the United States at the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards, which will be held in China and Paris in 2020.
Le Corbuffet is included in New York Magazine's "41 of the Year’s Most Giftable Coffee-Table Books." Read the piece here.
Le Corbuffet is featured in the French edition of Vanity Fair. Read "Art de vivre : « Le Corbuffet », le livre de recettes qui cuisine les stars de l’Art" by Margaux Krehl.
Please join us for a late afternoon picnic /social sculpture on Saturday, October 26th, to celebrate the release of artist Esther Choi’s new art/cookbook, Le Corbuffet: Edible Art and Design Classics. Held in conjunction with the MAK Center’s exhibition, Soft Schindler, the event will take place in an immersive outdoor installation designed by Laurel Consuelo Broughton of Welcome Projects. Soft Schindler curator, Mimi Zeiger will lead a discussion with Choi and Broughton, followed by a Q&A. Le Corbuffet-inspired nibbles interpreted by Esther Choi and Casey Dobbins will be on offer, as well as corbooziers courtesy of Yola Mezcal. Books will be available for purchase and signing. This event is open to MAK Center members. To RSVP, or to sign up for a membership, please email office@makcenter.org.
MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles
Saturday, October 26, 4-7PM
Vogue.com reviews Le Corbuffet:
"Artist and self-taught cook Esther Choi transcends the traditional cookbook format with these highly aesthetic, inspired recipes that interpret modern art and architecture through food. ... Don’t be fooled by this book’s spare typeface and strikingly quirky imagery—anyone who appreciates food that looks as good as it tastes will want this book."
Esther was invited to give a talk about the visual politics of sustainability at Cornell University AAP as part of their Living Room Event series.
Read Anne Quito's article about Le Corbuffet in Quartz: “…look beyond the book’s cheeky puns and there is meaty cultural critique… The book’s graphic design underscores Choi’s subversiveness too.”
Read an interview with Esther Choi by Kelly Caminero, senior photo editor of The Daily Beast.
Read Esther's recent interview about Le Corbuffet with LinYee Yuan in MOLD Magazine: "Whether this sounds like a menu for the dinner party of your absurdist dreams, or its sending you into a tizzy of pun-tastic possibilities, Le Corbuffet, a new cookbook featuring 60 recipes with names like Quiche Haring and Lucy Orta Torta, is a riotous homage to the art and design of cooking and consumption. ...Choi spoke with MOLD about the process of creating the book, the ways that cooking can be critique, and how food is political."
NYC Book Launch | Join Esther Choi in conversation with LinYee Yuan from Mold Magazine to discuss her new art/ cookbook, Le Corbuffet: Edible Art and Design Classics. Snacks and corbooziers will be served. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Open to all but please RSVP.
Friday Oct. 4, 2019, 7-9pm
Archestratus Books + Foods
160 Huron Street, Greenpoint
Brooklyn, New York
Le Corbuffet is reviewed in Core 77: "Esther Choi's book 'Le Corbuffet' is a delicious read."
Le Corbuffet is featured in Design Milk: "...we couldn’t help but eat it up! Choi’s recipes seek to encourage the integration of art in everyday life by distilling the practices of figures such as Frida Kahlo and Barbara Kruger into their best and most delicious aspects."
Le Corbuffet is featured in the New York Times's T Magazine "roundup of things our editors are excited about": "...her creations are delicious whether or not you prefer your bread rolls served in the shape of a Florence Knoll midcentury modern couch." Read "A Salad for Frida Kahlo, and Other Artist-Inspired Recipes," by Emma Orlow in T: The New York Times Style Magazine.
Le Corbuffet is featured on Artnet News.
Le Corbuffet is featured in Artribune. Read "Arte e cibo. Arriva Le Corbuffet, il ricettario concettuale di Esther Choi," by Valentina Tanni.
Le Corbuffet is featured on Colossal. Read "Le Corbuffet: Conceptual Cookbook Presents Art-Inspired Recipes as Contemporary Sculptures" by Kate Sierzputowski.
Le Corbuffet is featured on Kottke.org.
A series of still life photographs shot on assignment for T Magazine.
Esther was one of the six recipients of the 2019 Richard Rogers Fellowship, an award and residency program at the Wimbledon House in London, the landmarked residence designed by Lord Richard Rogers for his parents in the late 1960s. The six fellows named for the 2019 cycle were chosen from nearly 140 applicants from around the world. Since its inception, the Richard Rogers Fellowship has drawn serious scholars from a range of fields and backgrounds to London, where they have engaged with that city’s great research and design institutions.
A still life shoot shot on assignment for T Magazine.
Changes of State: A Workshop about Embodying Water at A/D/O –
Anthony Acciavatti and Esther Choi will lead an interactive workshop that explores the politics of sharing, consuming and caring for water in its many states. Using the Ganges River in India as their point of inspiration, Acciaviatti and Choi will lead participants through a series of performative thought experiments set against the backdrop of the Himalayas. Said to be one of the most polluted and dying rivers in the world, the Ganges is also revered by millions as sacred. This event will encourage new ways of thinking about our relationship with water and what it means to be a steward of our most precious commodity.
Nov. 28 and Nov. 29 7:00PM
This event is free and open to the public but RSVP is required. Click here for more information.
Esther will deliver a talk at Southern California Institute of Architecture, W.M. Keck Lecture Hall | November 14, 2018; 7:00pm.
SCI-Arc, 960 E 3rd St, Los Angeles, CA 90013.
More info can be found here.
Esther was commissioned by T Magazine to create images inspired by the Future Library. Read more here.
Esther gave a talk about "The Compositing Impulse" to students in Zeina Koreitem's course 'Digital Media: Image' (VIS-2226) at Harvard Graduate School of Design on 10/31/18. Thanks for the invitation, Zeina!
Esther gave a talk about her work with food as a design tool to form alternative kinship structures at Harvard Graduate School of Design on 10/30/18 at 6:30pm.
Esther will be an artist in residence in the Department of Photography at Concordia University in September 2018.
Architecture Is All Over, designed by Neil Donnelly and Ben Fehrman-Lee, is featured on the AIGA Eye on Design site! Read "This is What Post-digital Print Should Look Like”.
Esther Choi was interviewed about the relevance of the Pritzker Prize for Monocle Radio's podcast Monacle on Design. Listen to "Who Are the Pritzkers?"
At the Edge of Everything Else | St. Louis is a social space for artists, architects, urbanists, and others on the “critical spatial practice” spectrum. The name is poached from Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter’s 2010 'Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else'. Taking their titular gesture a step further, At the Edge of Everything Else privileges no one departure point, instead inhabiting an interdisciplinary center-space defined by the entanglement of the fields at its periphery: art, architecture, urban theory, cultural geography, landscape, and community development (to name a few). At the Edge of Everything Else is free and open to anyone working at the intersection of cultural and spatial production. www.edgeofeverythingstl.org
On May 15, Esther will present a paper at the Media and Modernity Doctoral Colloquium at Princeton School of Architecture. 5 PM, Room N-107
On April 7, Esther will be delivering a paper on the panel "Towards an Aesthetics of Geology in the Age of Anthropocene," at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Association for Art History taking place at the Courtauld Institute in London (April 5-7).
On April 6th, Esther will be participating in "On Sympathy: A One-Off Occasion" hosted by artist Isabel Lewis. In collaboration with the major exhibition, The Classical Now, artist Isabel Lewis will be hosting an occasion in the Bush House Arcade. The event will form part of the AAH Conference Festival, and this particular component will be free to the public. The event has been organized together with Michael Squire and Brooke Holmes.
Esther will partake in a conversation about microbes and the politics of dough with Orkan Telhan (UPenn) on April 2, as part of Princeton University's Mellon Forum: Sensorial Urbanism - The Aesthetics of Immateriality.
March 21 - Esther will deliver a talk about "sustainability's image problem" at Cranbrook Art Museum, as part of Cranbrook Academy of Art's Architecture Lecture Series.
The Winter 2018 issue of ART PAPERS features Robert Wiesenberger's thoughtfully written review of Architecture Is All Over. Read the review here.
Esther will be participating as a panelist in the Becoming Digital conference at the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning on February 2-3, 2018. More information can be found here.
Architecture Is All Over will be featured in the 2018 Brno Biennial of Graphic Design (May 10 - August 28, 2018). Designed by Neil Donnelly and Ben Fehrman-Lee, the book was selected by an international jury. Read more about the event here.
Architecture Is All Over is featured in Concordia Magazine. Read "What's Happening to Architecture?" by Matthew Scribner.
Architecture Is All Over is featured in an article on the evolving architectural book. Read The Architecture Book Is Alive But Evolving by Sammy Medina in the December 2017 issue of Metropolis.
The neighbourhood of Bedford–Stuyvesant in Brooklyn has the highest rate of food insecurity in New York City. To help spread the love to our fellow New Yorkers, a Le Corbuffet lunch event was organized for City Harvest, a food rescue organisation that helps to feed the hungry in New York City. Read more about the event here.
A conversation about reimagining labor, bureaucracy and the economics of practice amidst the neoliberal turn, with Amica Dall and Joseph Halligan of Assemble, and Esther Choi . 11/3 at 7pm. e-flux 311 E Broadway, New York, NY. Free and open to the public, sponsored by the Princeton-Mellon Initiative. More information can be found here.
Esther Choi and her forthcoming project Le Corbuffet are featured in The Globe and Mail's design section. Read It was all a Dream, by Kristina Ljubanovic
Two gorillas named Mok and Moina Mozissa were some of the earliest residents of modern architecture in England. Although they were considered a novel attraction in their own right, most of the attention that accompanied their arrival from the Congo was directed towards the modern house that was built for them. Commissioned by the Zoological Society of London, the Gorilla House by Tecton was considered a marvel of innovative design and technological advancement that far surpassed any building that had been built in England. While it may appear that the Zoo’s grounds provided an unlikely canvas for a new era of modern architectural expression in Britain, this talk explores how geopolitical pressures, not too unlike the ones responsible for the Zoological Society’s formation, prompted the display of Mok and Moina’s exotic wildness in the most ‘civilised’, domesticated, and troubling circumstances of captivity.
Please join us for a talk entitled "The Nature of the Beast: Tecton and the Gorilla House at the London Zoo," at The Center for Experimental Humanities at NYU. New York University, 14 University Place (next to Deutsches Haus), New York, NY, 12:30-1:45pm. Free and open to the public. More information can be found here.
Join coeditors Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter, along with contributors Troy Schaum and Rosalyne Shieh of Schaum/ Shieh, on 10/18 for our first event to celebrate the launch of Architecture Is All Over! This event is free, but RSVPs are required. A/D/O, 29 Norman Avenue, Greenpoint, Brooklyn, NY, 7-9pm. RSVP here
Architecture Is All Over in the LA Times: "There’s a new book from Columbia University Press, edited by Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter, called 'Architecture Is All Over.' The title, of course, has a double meaning: architecture is everywhere and nowhere, stylish and impotent, feted and spent. That split personality is a Bilbao Effect too." Two decades after Gehry's Guggenheim Bilbao, where does architecture stand? by Christopher Hawthorne
In August, Esther interviewed Andrea Trimarchi of Studio Formafantasma and Brent Dzekciorious of Dzek about their fascinating experiments to transform volcanic ash into an architectural material. You can read the article on this site, or online at SSENSE.
Esther was an invited critic for a workshop led by Anthony Engi Meacock and Joseph Halligan of Assemble Studio, at the University of Michigan. The workshop is part of "Collective Memories", a studio co-taught by Assistant Professor Tsz Yan Ng (Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning) and Professor David Chung (The Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design).
Architecture Is All Over is now available for purchase! You can find it at McNally Jackson (New York); the New Museum (New York); Spoonbill & Sugartown (Brooklyn); the Graham Foundation (Chicago); Labyrinth Books (Princeton); the AA Bookshop (London); RIBA Bookshop (London); Serpentine Bookshop (London); the Canadian Centre for Architecture (Montréal); Books, People, Places (Berlin); and the list of retailers continues to grow. Alternatively, you can order it directly from Columbia University Press or Amazon.
Esther contributed an essay entitled "Second Lives" to Reaper: Sigfried Giedion and Richard Hamilton, a collection of essays edited by Carson Chan (JRP Ringier, 2017). The starting point of this publication—and its eponymous exhibition—is the conceptual encounter between English Pop artist Richard Hamilton (1922–2011) and Swiss historian and critic of architecture Sigfried Giedion (1888–1968). In the exhibition at the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich (May 3–June 25 2017), Hamilton is represented by his early series of “Reaper works” (1949), inspired by Giedion’s seminal publication Mechanization Takes Command.
Sammy Medina of Metropolis Magazine sat down with Esther Choi and Marrikka Trotter to discuss their forthcoming volume, Architecture Is All Over. Is Architecture Finished? Depends How You Define It.