Making a Little Go a Long Way: The Architecture of Estrangement
Faculty Fellow Lecture Series
October 6, 2026
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607, Select
Calendar
Download iCal FileNot all architecture wants us to feel at home. This lecture asks: when does making domestic intimacy strange produce critical distance, and when does it merely entertain? It begins with a 1931 conversation between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin about dwelling after the bourgeois interior. Benjamin found an answer in traceless surfaces of glass and steel, and the tabula rasa of the concrete frame. Brecht turned to the nomadic guest, whose presence unsettles habitual relations to objects and space. Following Brecht’s theatrical method of estrangement, the lecture moves to Chicago, the distant metropolis where his plays exposed capitalism’s effects on everyday life.There, the steel frame converted openness into speculation, experimental glass houses marketed mobility, and residential hotels organized transient dwelling within fireproof concrete structures. These architectures define estrangement not as novelty or discomfort, but as a project of distance: making the spatial and economic conventions of dwelling perceptible, questionable, and open to transformation.
Francesco Marullo is Associate Professor at the UIC School ofArchitecture. His research interrogates the relations between space, labor, and production through the multiple forms of the architectural project—from words to drawings, from abstraction to construction.
Contact huminst@uic.edu to request accessibility accommodations.
Date posted
Sep 15, 2026
Date updated
Sep 15, 2026