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Left to Right: 1) Analogue Sites – Park at 53rd 2) U.S. Embassy, Athens (Walter Gropius, 1961)
Cold War American Embassies and Analogue Sites
Monday, February 27, 2025
2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. ET
Join APT for a lecture by artist and preservation architect Jorge Otero-Pailos, as he delves into the creative process and history leading to artworks in his sculpture exhibition, Analogue Sites, currently displayed on Park Avenue in Manhattan. The presentation examines the architectural vision of American embassies constructed during the Cold War and Otero-Pailos’ artistic intervention at the decommissioned Cold War-era U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway, designed by Eero Saarinen. Otero-Pailos will discuss the sculptures he crafted from the steel fence that once safeguarded the embassy, an artifact he rescued from the scrapyard, considering it a vital piece of history.
The embassies were architectural masterpieces, designed by some of America’s greatest modern architects, including—in addition to Saarinen—Edward Durell Stone, Richard Neutra, Walter Gropius, Marcel Breuer, and Josep Lluís Sert. The structures shared unique design features, unimaginable in embassies today. They were cultural centers, immigration gateways, and diplomatic offices with free and open public libraries, art galleries, and theaters.
The lecture offers an insightful look at the intersection of art, diplomacy, and preservation, revealing how Otero-Pailos’ work captures and reimagines these historical narratives through his artistic lens.
Continuing Education Credits
1 LU/HSW/PDH
Registration Fees
- APT Members: $20
- Emerging Professionals: $15
- Students: $10
- Non-Members: $35
Speaker:
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Jorge Otero-Pailos is an American-Spanish artist, preservation architect, scholar, and educator renowned for pioneering experimental preservation practices. He employs artistic methods, informed by advanced technologies, materials research, and interdisciplinary collaborations to expand the range of objects that are valued as cultural heritage and to develop new ways of caring for those objects. His wide-ranging artistic practice finds expression through materials like airborne atmospheric dust, smells, sounds, and architectural fragments. Alongside his art and preservation practices, he is Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), where he also directs the Columbia Preservation Technology Lab, and where he founded the United States’ first PhD program in Historic Preservation (2017). Otero-Pailos is a licensed architect who studied architecture at Cornell University and earned a doctorate in architecture at MIT.
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