Welcome to the home for podcast episodes created by Rice University students in HART 473/573 Evolution Custom Built: Architecture, Genetics and the Anthropocene. This course, taught by Nikki Moore and Fabiola Lopez-Duran, engages the history of attempts by architects, planners, artists, scientists, politicians and technocrats to not only shape twentieth century ecologies, but to transform their constitutions, beginning at the level of human chromosomes and extending to the scale of vast rural and urban landscapes.

The podcasts hosted here were written, directed and recorded by a group of interdisciplinary undergraduate and graduate students during the Spring 2019 semester, including:

Architecture major Belle Carroll, class of 2019

Art major Miranda Morris, class of 2019

Ecology and Evolutionary Biology double major Isaac Carroo, class of 2019

Economics major Alice Liu, class of 2020

Environmental Studies major Eddie Tang, class of 2020

Environmental Studies major Lola Deng, class of 2021

M.Arch. Jeremy Harrienger, 1st year

M.Arch. Tiffany Xu, 2nd year

Art History Ph.D student Henry McMahon, 1st year

Art History Ph.D student Elaine Wang

Nikki Moore is a Ph.D Candidate in Art History at Rice University in May 2019. Her current research focuses on the industrialization of food-based commodities and concurrent development practices in modern Latin America, focusing on their symbiotic relationship to art and architectural practice. Moore is a fellow with the University-Based Institute for Advanced Study Intercontinental Academia. Her research is supported by the Social Science Research Council, the Mellon Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Wagoner Foundation, Rice University and the Society of Architectural Historians. Her work has been published in Europe, Brazil, Australia, and the United States.

Fabiola López-Durán is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at Rice University. She earned her Ph.D in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Adopting a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective, López-Durán’s work analyzes the cross-pollination of ideas and mediums—science, politics and aesthetics—that informed the process of modernization on both sides of the Atlantic, with an emphasis on Latin America. Her book, Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity, investigates a particular strain of eugenics that, at the turn of the twentieth century, moved from the realms of medicine and law to design, architecture, and urban planning—becoming a critical instrument in the crafting of modernity. Her awards include fellowships from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, Dedalus Foundation, CLIR, Harvard Center for European Studies, Camargo Foundation, Samuel H. Kress Foundation, and the Fulbright Program. Her work has been published in Europe, Asia, South America, and the United States.

Any questions about the class or the episodes featured herein can be sent to nikki.m.moore@rice.edu.

This course is offered through the Department of Art History at Rice University.