October 26, 2026
Logan Center for the Arts, University of Chicago
"Whole Life Buildings and the Material Life of Cities"
An OPC talk with artist and DoVA faculty member Amber Ginsburg followed by a conversation with Bill Brown, Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, and Hajin Kim, Assistant Professor of Law.
Rethinking the life of buildings to include their birth and death, Amber Ginsburg reimagines our collective extraction as a means for carbon banking toward a more abundant future. In this talk, Ginsburg will discuss the transformation of a 1923 house of worship into a co-making space for artists on the South Side of Chicago. This retrofit offers a model for leveraging the embodied carbon in our existing buildings as a bank to finance carbon-neutral cities.
Presented by the Open Practice Committee in the Department of Visual Arts
Amber Ginsburg creates site-generated projects and social sculptures that insert historical scenarios into present-day situations, as well as engages present-day histories to imagine alternative futures. Her background in craft orients her projects toward the continuities and ruptures in material and social histories. Amber teaches in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago and shows broadly including at the Thailand Biennale, the Bristol Biennial, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Craft and Design, various sidewalks, and empty lots, to name a few.
Bill Brown is the Karla Scherer Distinguished Service Professor in American Culture, appointed in the Department of English, the Department of Visual Arts, and the College. He is a principal investigator for the Object Cultures Project within the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory and has been a co-editor of Critical Inquiry since 1993.
Hajin Kim is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Law School. She uses principles from social psychology and economics to study how moral and social influence can shape environmental regulation and firm behavior.