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Brigham Presents "The Politics of Architecture" in Spain

John Brigham gave an invited presentation at the International Institute for the Sociology of Law in Oñati, Spain on Monday, March 14. His presentation -- co-presented with Susan Ball, Director of Programs at the New York Foundation for the Arts -- linked the "Chaos and Classicism" exhibition currently at the Guggenheim in Bilbao with the strongly neo-classical US Supreme Court building, thereby raising issues about how architecture reflects and reinforces social and cultural trends. According to Brigham, many people "forget that the Supreme Court building was built in the 1930s and associate its classical style with antiquity rather than seeing it as an political statement."

While in Spain, Brigham was also invited to speak at the conference, "Concepts through Images in Technology and Law: History and the Web 3.0," at the Institut d’Estudis Catalans (the Catalan Academy of Sciences and Humanities) in Barcelona on March 18. His presentation here, "The Politics of Architecture: Barcelona, Paris and Washington, DC. in the 1930s," further explored the contest between modern and classical images in the 1930s.

Brigham is professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He is author of Material Law: A Jurisprudence of What's Real (Temple, 2009).

 

 

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