Contested Spaces: Aesthetics, History and Politics Between Cinema and Architecture

Contested Spaces: Aesthetics, History and Politics Between Cinema and Architecture

Cinema and Media Studies | College of Arts and Humanities | History | Russian | School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures |

School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation

Thursday, October 23, 2025 - October 24, 2025 St. Mary’s Hall Multipurpose Room

How have spatial narratives, built environments and their cinematic representations shaped our understanding of the world? How has the intersection between cinema and architecture articulated itself historically from the 1960s to the present? The conference on “Contested Spaces” serves to initiate a dialogue between intellectual historians, scholars of film and scholars and practitioners of design and the built environment.

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Thursday, Oct. 23

9–9:30 a.m. Breakfast
9:15 a.m. Welcome

9:30 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Panel 1: Underground

This panel interrogates how the underground might function as a medium, an archive, a system of interfaces, and spaces of extraction, labor, image-making, knowledge production and ideological mobilization.

Panelists

• Sasha Razor | Lecturer in film and media studies and in Germanic and Slavic studies, University of California, Santa Barbara | Carceral Underground: Detention Space as Contested Media Infrastructure in Belarus (2020–2025)

• Shiqi Lin | Klarman Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Asian Studies, Cornell University | Museums, Hot Pots, Raves: Rethinking Global Social History Through a Bunker Ecology

• Chan Yong Bu | Assistant professor of East Asian languages and civilizations, Harvard University | The Surface War: Panorama in the South Korean Imaginary of Underground North Korean Spy Tunnels

• Belinda Qian He | Assistant professor of East Asian cinema and media studies, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign | Politics of Ground Breaking: The Ambiguous Trialscape Between Tai Kwun and Prison Architect (2018)

Discussant: Karen Redrobe, Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Professor of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Moderator: Peter Noonan, FAIA LEED AP, professor of the practice, School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland

12:30–1:30 p.m. Lunch

Participants are invited to explore a poster exhibition of student work from courses taught by Marjan Moosavi, Roshan assistant clinical professor in Persian studies and performing arts, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, UMD, and Peter Noonan.

1:30–4:30 p.m. Panel 2: Façade/Masquerade

This session focuses on the role of the mask, the fake façade, the masquerade, the occultation, and the conscious search for misunderstanding and misidentification in cinema and architecture of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond.

Panelists

• Peter T. Lang | Independent curator, lecturer in visual arts and design, NABA Rome; former professor of theory and history at the Royal Art Institute, Stockholm, Department of Architecture | When Italian Design Was Made to Be Televised: The Exhibition “Italy: The New Domestic Landscape” at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) 1972, and the Bold New Multimedia World of Environmental Prototypes

• Paul Cote | Senior lecturer, Department of English, University of Maryland | Music, Architecture and the Façade of Mexico: Constructing and Destroying Spatial Masks in Morricone’s Western Scores

• Michael Bers Baick | Independent scholar, Washington, D.C. | “Build a Town, Build It Fast”: Reading Barbieland and Los Alamos as Campuses (With Cracked Facades!)

• Luca Caminati | Professor of film and moving image studies, Concordia University, Montreal | Camouflage as Resistance: Spaces of Italian Anticolonial Struggles

Discussant: Cécile Accilien, professor of French and Francophone studies, University of Maryland
Moderator: Saverio Giovacchini, professor and director of graduate studies, Department of History, University of Maryland

Friday, Oct. 24

9:30–10 a.m. Breakfast

10 a.m.–12:30 p.m. Panel 3: Keynote & Moderated Discussion

Vladimir Paperny | 2025 Maya Brin Resident; author, designer, architectural historian; adjunct professor of Slavic, East European and Eurasian languages and cultures, University of California, Los Angeles | Is There Any Difference Between Architecture and Film?

Moderated discussion with Vladimir Paperny

• Peter T. Lang, Ph.D. | Independent curator; lecturer in visual arts and design, NABA Rome; former professor of theory and history, Royal Art Institute, Stockholm, Department of Architecture

• Peter Noonan, FAIA LEED AP | Professor of the practice, School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, University of Maryland

12:30–1:30 p.m. Lunch

Participants are invited to explore a poster exhibition of student work from courses taught by Marjan Moosavi, Roshan assistant clinical professor in Persian studies and performing arts, Roshan Institute for Persian Studies, University of Maryland, and Peter Noonan, as well as a media exhibition of visual materials related to the conference.

1:30–4:30 p.m. Panel 4: Spaces of Connection

This session examines the spatial and infrastructural dimensions of cinematic and mediated connections, exploring how institutions, networks and built environments — ranging from film schools and archives to exhibitions, activist hubs and “soft power” initiatives — not only facilitate media circulation but also shape the aesthetic and political genealogies of media forms.

Panelists

• Hester Baer | Professor of cinema and media studies and German studies, University of Maryland | Spatial Orientations: Film Education at the Ulm School for Design (1962–68) and the Formation of Feminist Countercinema

• Mariano Mestman | Head researcher, National Research Council (CONICET), Gino Germani Research Institute, Department of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires, Argentina | Film, Art Exhibitions, Design and Visual Culture Surrounding the Havana Cultural Congress (January 1968)

• Felicity D. Scott | Professor of architecture; director, Ph.D. program in architecture (history and theory), Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University | Environments of Governance: Elements of Habitat’s Audiovisual Program, c. 1976

• Masha Salazkina | Professor of film and moving image studies, Concordia University | Montreal Global Disco: Space(s), Places and Geographies of Boney M.

Discussant: Paula Halperin, associate professor of cinema studies and history, director of the School of Film and Media, Purchase College, SUNY
Moderator: Jayson Maurice Porter, assistant professor of environmental history, Department of History, University of Maryland

Sponsored by

Maya Brin Residency Program | Department of History | Cinema and Media Studies Program

With support from the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation; School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures; Roshan Institute for Persian Studies; Language House Living-Learning Program

Image credit: 
Joseph McKenley, Zain Shah
ARCH4/678C Architecture & Cinema: Place + Film, Prof. Noonan

About Vladimir Paperny

Vladimir Paperny is the 2025 Maya Brin Resident at the University of Maryland. He is an author, designer and architectural historian, and faculty member of the University of California, Los Angeles. He received his master’s in design from Stroganov Art School in Moscow and his Ph.D. in cultural studies from the Russian State University for the Humanities.

His doctoral thesis, Culture Two: Architecture in the Age of Stalin, was published in Russian by Ardis (Ann Arbor, 1985) and later by NLO (Moscow, 1996), in English (Cambridge University Press, 2003), in Czech (Arbor Vitae) and in Italian (Artemide). Since moving to the United States in 1981, Paperny has been a visiting professor at USC, UCLA, the Woodrow Wilson Center and Bristol University in the United Kingdom.

He co-edited Architecture of Great Expositions 1937–1958: Messages of Peace and Images of War (Ashgate, 2015). His articles and essays, in both English and Russian, have appeared in Architectural Digest, Project Russia, Speech, Vogue, Snob and other publications. His collections of essays (in Russian) include Mos Angeles, Mos Angeles-2 (NLO) and Fuck Context? (Tatlin).

He recently published Cinema, Culture, and the Zeitgeist (Kino, kul’tura, i dukh vremeni, NLO, 2023), and has a new book of memoirs coming out later this year: How I was a Designer (Kak ia byl dizainerom, NLO, 2025).