About Christopher Siwicki

Beaux-Arts composition was predicated on a shared consensus of “universal” design principles, along with the spatial protocols for implementing them hypothetically anywhere. Yet by tracing the circulation and use of this design method within and beyond the French colonial empire—from Algiers to Rio de Janeiro to Hanoi to Tokyo—a more complicated picture emerges. Drawing on over ten years of archival research and fieldwork, this talk uncovers the frictions that arise when universal ambitions meet the ground and encounter local, situated resistance. What emerges from these case studies is a new understanding of how a rules-based design system catalyzed the rise of a rules-based liberal international order—while also contributing to its demise.

About David Sadighian

David Sadighian teaches architectural history and theory at Yale University, where he is Assistant Professor of Architecture. His scholarship examines histories of the built environment with an emphasis on architecture’s intersections with empire, capitalism, and material culture. He is currently completing his first book, The World is a Composition, which explores how the global circulation of design methods taught at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts shaped emerging institutions and practices of international order, c.1870-1930. 

Beyond this research, David has published on topics including the architecture of nineteenth-century international finance, theories of public space, museum architecture, and racial capitalism in Brazil. Support for his research and studies has been provided by the Social Science Research Council, the American Historical Association, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and the Graham Foundation, among other organizations. Most recently, he was awarded the 2025 Theodor Fischer Prize from the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich for his doctoral dissertation, which he completed at Harvard’s Department of History of Art and Architecture in 2023.

The artist Katrina Palmer's End Matter (2015) was made on and about the Isle of Portland in Dorset, England. Taking shape across a book, installation and audio walks, Palmer's work centers on a fictional organization called the Loss Adjusters who are occupied with counterpoising the holes and cavities of Portland against the buildings and monuments constructed from Portland stone, an oolitic limestone which has been quarried on the Isle since Roman times. Although End Matter engages a sculptural grammar of carving, cuts and loss, the hole does not appear as void-like, entropic or abyssal, in distinction from how this form is typically mobilized and analyzed within the history of post-war European and North American sculpture. By tracing Portland stone's circulation from prison labour to the monuments of the British establishment and colonial infrastructures, Gogarty argues that Palmer's End Matter illuminates the ideological and material construction of history and heritage, repositioning the hole as a sculptural form which can be understood as a conduit rather than a void. 

About Dr. Larne Abse Gogarty 

Gogarty is a writer and art historian from London. She is Associate Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London. Larne is the author of two books: What We Do Is Secret: Contemporary Art and the Antinomies of Conspiracy (Sternberg Press, 2023) and Usable Pasts: Social Practice and State Formation in American Art (Brill, 2022) Currently, she is working on a new project about recent sculpture, manufacture and commodity culture. Larne has written catalogue essays for artists including Sam Gilliam, Alice Neel, and Gray Wielebinski and regularly writes criticism, mainly for Art Monthly. In 2026, she curated the exhibition Conspiracies at the Warburg Institute, London. She is in the editorial group for Selva and Oxford Art Journal.

Image credit: Katrina Palmer, End Matter: The Loss Adjusters 2015. Photo: Brendan Buesnel