Craig Buckley

Craig Buckley is a historian of modern architecture and its intersections with the visual arts and media.

His first book Graphic Assembly: Montage, Media and Experimental Architecture in the 1960s (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) provided a new understanding of montage and collage as cultural techniques central to architectural culture. Such techniques, it argued, fostered experimental approaches to industrial assembly during the 1960s by means of new media such as offset-lithographic printing, portable film cameras, slide projectors, and video recorders.

A second book project, Screen Genealogies: From Optical Device to Environmental Media (University of Amsterdam Press, 2019), co-edited with Yale colleagues Francesco Casetti and Rüdiger Campe, examined the contemporary proliferation of screens from an interdisciplinary perspective, bringing together new genealogical approaches to the environmental and infrastructural roles played by screens over the last five centuries.

His current book project explores cinema architectures in Paris, Casablanca, Berlin, São Paulo, and New York during the first half of the twentieth century. Examining the pivotal role buildings played in the mass circulation of audio-visual media, the book also theorizes the conflicting functions such architecture assumed; as platforms for new kinds of sociability and milieus of technical innovation, but also as instruments used to categorize and segregate spectators on the basis of race, class, and gender.

Professor Buckley is interested in supervising dissertations from a wide variety of perspectives on topics concerning architecture in the twentieth century, including, but not limited to, modern architecture’s relationship with avant-gardes and socio-political movements, as well as its manifold relations with print culture, the visual arts, and optical media.