Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley curated the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial around the question Are We Human?, resulting in an ambitious series of exhibitions, symposia, publications and on-line experiments which can only be described as a true exploration of the intimate and strange relationship between human and design. Colomina and Wigley began with the provocation: ‘design always presents itself as serving the human but its real ambition is to redesign the human’. During this event, Colomina and Wigley explored their recently published 'field notes' that reach beyond the Biennial to rethink our species and - as true archaeologists - unveil the way design has gone viral and is now bigger than the world.
Beatriz Colomina
Internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist from Spain based in New York, Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her books include Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media, Sexuality and Space, Domesticity at War, Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies and Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (2010). She is curator with a team of Princeton Ph.D. students of the exhibitions Playboy Architecture, 1953–79 and Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education in a Time of Disciplinary Instability.
Mark Wigley
Architectural theorist, critic, and historian from New Zealand based in New York, Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. His books include White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995), Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998) and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio. He has curated numerous exhibitions and is one founders of Volume magazine.
