LECTURE: Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen (Yale) on Architecture’s Eco-Humanist Turn

Public Lecture : “Architecture’s Eco-Humanist Turn”

^{Image Source: Sidney and Arilla Troxel House, Shulman Photo Archive, Getty Research Institute}

The talk is centered around the decade following the Second World war when concern for the human condition gave rise to a new intellectual sensibility, ecohumanism, which led architects to pay attention to how humans inhabit the earth. Work and words by architects Sverre Fehn, Mies van der Rohe, Richard Neutra, and Rudolf Schwarz will be placed in the context of a broader intellectual culture defined by era-defining thinkers, such as Albert Camus, Erich Fromm, Martin Heidegger, and Lewis Mumford.

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Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen is a Professor at Yale School of Architecture, where she teaches both architectural design and history-theory subjects. Her scholarly interests cover 20th Century European and American art and architecture, exhibition culture, aesthetic theory, and history of ideas. She has authored several prize-winning books, including Alvar Aalto: Architecture, Modernity and Geopolitics (Yale, 2009), Eero Saarinen: Shaping the Future (Yale, 2006), Exhibit A: Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000 (Phaidon, 2018), and Untimely Moderns: How 20th Century Architecture Reimagined the Past (Yale, 2023).

Pelkonen is joining ACAHUCH for November 2025, supported by the Macgeorge Bequest at the University of Melbourne.