Léopold Lambert
poster by Ghida Anouti
Léopold Lambert
Editing The Funambulist
Part of the MIT Spring 2024 Architecture Lecture Series. Presented with the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture.
The Funambulist started in 2010 as a blog, featuring Léopold Lambert's articles about the many forms through which architecture is materializing regimes of political oppression on bodies; a conversation that seemed underaddressed back then. In 2013, it was augmented with a podcast whose ambition was to exfiltrate knowledge produced within universities.
Marking a new editorial endeavor, the first issue of The Funambulist magazine was published in August 2015. Since then, the magazine has been published six times a year, each time mobilizing a particular approach to the spaces of the anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer, and feminist struggles (among others), and a commitment to building internationalist solidarities. The magazine currently counts 51 issues, 650 contributors, and close to 4,000 subscribers across geographical scales.
In November 2023, The Funambulist initiated a new project consisting of translating the magazine in several languages, thereby sharing its resources with plurilingual imaginaries. Starting issue 50, the magazine exists in a francophone version, and by the end of 2024, a hispanophone version should emerge as well.
Léopold Lambert is a Paris-based trained architect. He is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist, a print and online magazine dedicated to the politics of space and bodies. He is the author of four books analyzing architecture's complicity with settler colonialism and structural racism, in particular in Palestine, Algeria, Kanaky, and France's banlieues. The two most recent of these books are Bulldozer Politics: The Palestinian Ruin as an Israeli Project (fr, B2, 2016) and States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (fr, PMN, 2021; eng, Columbia Books on architecture and the city, forthcoming 2024). His next book project investigates the key and the spoon as two objects mobilizing architecture's political violence and the escape from it.
This lecture will be held in person in Long Lounge, 7-429 and streamed online.
Lectures are free and open to the public. Lectures will be held Thursdays at 6 PM ET in 7-429 (Long Lounge) and streamed online unless otherwise noted. Registration required to attend in-person. Register here or watch the webcast on Youtube.