09/28/2026
Join us for our Faculty Fellow Lecture Series on Tuesday, October 6, from 4:00-5:30PM!
Francesco Marullo is Associate Professor at the UIC School of Architecture. His research interrogates the relations between space, labor, and production through the multiple forms of the architectural project—from words to drawings, from abstraction to construction.
Not all architecture wants us to feel at home. Marullo’s lecture asks when making domestic intimacy strange can produce critical distance—and when it merely entertains. It begins with a 1931 conversation between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin about dwelling after the bourgeois interior. Benjamin found an answer in traceless surfaces of glass and steel, and the tabula rasa of the concrete frame. Brecht turned to the nomadic guest, whose presence unsettles habitual relations to objects and space. Following Brecht’s theatrical method of estrangement, the lecture moves to Chicago, the distant metropolis where his plays exposed capitalism’s effects on everyday life. There, the steel frame converted openness into speculation, experimental glass houses marketed mobility, and residential hotels organized transient dwelling within fireproof concrete structures. These architectures define estrangement not as novelty or discomfort, but as a project of distance: making the spatial and economic conventions of dwelling perceptible, questionable, and open to transformation.
Contact [email protected] to request accessibility accommodations.
Image credit: Bertolt Brecht, “Im Dickicht der Städte,” cover of the first edition, 1927. © Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin. Courtesy of the Bertolt Brecht Archiv.
