PhD Dialogues
David Turturo and Annabel J. Wharton
Architecture and the Framing of Bodies
David Turturo is an architect and a sixth year Ph.D. candidate in the history and theory of architecture at Yale. His dissertation, “Caryatid: Architecture and the Framing of Bodies,” considers similarities between buildings that resemble bodies and buildings that display bodies. The primary argument is that the visual relationship between architecture and bodies is political. Responding to the Vitruvian myth of caryatid-slaves, this trans-historical analysis queries how architectural frames produce figures and subjects through order, scale, identity, and autonomy.
Annabel J. Wharton serves as the William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History at Duke University. She previously served as the first female Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture in 2014 and as the Harry Porter Visiting Professor of Architectural History, University of Virginia School of Architecture in 2019. She received her Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute, London University. Initially her research focused on Late Ancient and Byzantine art and culture (Art of Empire [Penn State] and Refiguring the Post-Classical City [Cambridge]). Then she began to investigate the effects of modernity on ancient landscapes, notably in Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, 2001). She has combined her interests in the Ancient and the Modern in her last two books: Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago, 2006) and Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings (Minnesota, 2015). Architectural Agents considers material and digital buildings as agents that both endure pain and inflict it. Her new book, Models and World Making: Buildings, Bodies, Black Boxes (University of Virginia Press) will appear at the end of 2021.