A Shelter, a Garden, and an Act of Refusal

Theodossis Issaias
204 Frick Fine Arts 

Encampment –from processing centers to UNHCR camps– has become the material manifestation of migration and humanitarianism. The reverse is also true: humanitarianism has transformed into a system of standardized processes for managing encampment. What contingent processes gave rise to this form of humanitarian governance and to its normative architectures? What can we learn about architecture if we treat migration as its own form of knowledge? These are the animating questions of the lecture, which turns to a period between the 1919 and 1930s, when conflict, displacement, and territorial insecurity provoked the reconfiguration of humanitarian operations –their spatial organization and ethical imperatives. The lecture charts the precarious refugee and minority regime put in place by the League of Nations and focuses on its Refugee Settlement Commission of the League (RSC), which operated as humanitarian-via-development agency responsible for the settlement of 1.5 million refugees in the Balkans. It pays particular attention to its rural settlement programs that utilized land reform and mass homeownership – a garden and a shelter – as its primary instruments. In this spatial program, humanitarian relief and nation-building, migration and sedentarization as well as the imperatives of international peace system entrenched representations, languages, and practices that have stayed with us ever since.

Bio

Theodossis (Theo) Issaias is an architect and educator. He serves as Associate Curator, Heinz Architectural Center (HAC), at Carnegie Museum of Art and Special Faculty at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. He studied architecture in Athens, Greece, and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from MIT. His PhD dissertation, entitled Architectures of the Humanitarian Front (2021), from Yale School of Architecture, explored the history of modern architecture and urbanism, and the link between conflict, displacement, and the provision of shelter. Theodossis is co-founder Fatura Collaborative, an architecture and research collective.