Modernists of the early twentieth century were transfixed by the X-ray—a means of seeing through skin into systems of bones and tissue. What, nearly a century later, can X-rays reveal about the systems of modernism itself? Modern Management Methods asks how the value of a building is produced through instruments of expertise, management ideologies, and historical narratives. Through unorthodox survey practices, the project uses the imaging techniques of conservation and the documentary detritus of heritage preservation to show how scientific methods attempt to produce stable notions of history and value. Deploying the medium of the X-ray, Caitlin Blanchfield and Farzin Lotfi-Jam tell two related histories of building conservation, internationalism, and the making of modernist meaning through the architect Le Corbusier’s building Stuttgart’s Weissenhofsiedlung and the United Nations Headquarters in New York City.
Caitlin Blanchfield is a historian of architecture and landscape whose work examines the infrastructures of settler colonialism and material practices of resistance. Her research addresses the role of modernist land management and design practices in projects of dispossession and colonization in North America and across the reaches of U.S. empire, as well as the anticolonial architectures that unsettle them. Blanchfield completed her Ph.D. in architectural history and theory at Columbia University, with her dissertation: "Contesting Landscapes: Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Resistance, and the Architecture of Big Science." Other work includes collaborative investigations into the impacts of border infrastructures on Indigenous lands and multimedia projects on the management of architectural value. Blanchfield is a founding editor of the Avery Review, a digital journal of critical essays on architecture, her coauthored book Modern Management Methods: Architecture, Historical Value, and the Electromagnetic Image was published by Columbia University Press in 2019. Her work has been supported by the New York State Council for the Arts, Dumbarton Oaks, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. She holds an M.S. in Critical Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from Columbia University and a B.A. in history from Oberlin College.