Surry Schlabs

Surry Schlabs is a historian and teacher whose work engages the aesthetic qualities of shared experience, exploring a range of socially charged and participatory aesthetic and political practices, characterized by their distinctly public character and socially intensive contexts. His doctoral dissertation, Waiting for Architecture: John Dewey and the Limits of Modern Art, concerned the specific relevance of Dewey’s Pragmatist philosophy to the evolution of modernist art and architecture in the middle decades of the 20th century, and to a range of projects sharing an implicit aspiration to architecture as a way of thinking, a thing in the making, or an aesthetic limit condition – as perhaps the end of art itself. Before returning to Yale for his PhD, Surry worked for several years in and around New Haven, serving as project manager and designer at both Gray Organschi Architecture and the Yale Urban Design Workshop.