Marrikka Trotter: “The general idea of life:” On Liveliness and Individuation in Architecture

Threading a nonlinear pattern in a High Victorian chancel together with the strange mereologies of contemporary “discrete” architecture, parafictional stratigraphy, and the glitchy phase lags explored in Gilbert Simondon’s mid-twentieth-century theory of individuation, Trotter’s faculty talk will examine a few historical intersections between a particular concept of “liveliness” and architectural design before asking how this idea might be brought to bear on future practice.

Marrikka Trotter is an architectural historian and theorist whose research examines the historical intersections between geology, architecture, agriculture, and landscape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She is co-editor of the contemporary architectural theory collections Architecture at the Edge of Everything Else (The MIT Press: 2010) and Architecture is All Over (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City: 2017), and her writing has appeared in publications such as Harvard Design Magazine, Log, and AA Files. She received her PhD from Harvard University in 2017, and her work has received funding from the Paul Mellon Centre, the Graham Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, and Sir John Soane's Museum, among others. She is a full-time faculty member at SCI-Arc, where she coordinates the history + theory curriculum.