Yale Architecture Forum
Enrique Ramírez
Iceblink Space: Photography, Architecture, and International Law in the Circumpolar North
This talk focuses on a book of photographs taken by Alfred Lee Broadbent, an Assistant Engineer aboard the United States Revenue Cutters Bear and Thomas Corwin on patrol in Alaska and Siberia from 1885 to 1892. Broadbent was not a professional photographer, and yet his images reveal a documentarian’s purview, a panoramic glimpse at the diverse peoples, flora, fauna, as well as the landscapes and buildings of the Bering Strait Region. These photographs, however, revealed a part of the world whose legal status was in flux—literally. Ice, a medium that could be elusive and fugitive, that melted, drifted, formed, and reformed, elided distinctions between competing legal traditions in the Circumpolar North: terrestrial legal norms clashed with the customary international law of the sea, which were was at odds with the ways that Iñupiaq, Siberian Yupik and Central Yup’ik peoples imagined and used this realm. Along with the media of ice and photography, ships also contributed to this fragmented and blurred understanding of territory in this region. Used as mobile courthouses, ships like the USRC Bear and Thomas Corwin were at the forefront of an expanded understanding of the relation between buildings and land. Whether as instruments of colonialist agendas or techniques for extralegal claims on territory, the use of such vessels was an instance where architectural thinking entered the modern international legal arena.
Enrique Ramirez is the Frances and Gilbert P. Schafer Visiting Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan. His work considers histories of buildings, environments, and landscapes alongside larger cultures of textual, literary, and object production in Europe and the Americas from the Renaissance onwards. He received a BA in History from Northwestern University and his JD in Public and Private International law from the George Washington University Law School. After studying Urban Planning at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), he received a Master of Environmental Design from Yale School of Architecture and a PhD in the History and Theory of Architecture from Princeton University, where he was a Whiting Scholar. His work has been recognized and supported by various organizations, including the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, and most recently, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.