Yale Architecture Forum: Enrique Ramirez (University of Michigan)

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. These photographs 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.

Enrique Ramírez is the Frances and Gilbert P. Schafer Visiting Professor of Architecture at theTaubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.