Date:
Location: Chicago , United StatesContact: Ralph Ghoche
Email: rg2169@columbia.edu
Website: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2026/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html
A session at The College Art Association (CAA) 114th Annual Conference soliciting Contributors
Location and Conference dates: Chicago, February 18–21, 2026.
Session Chairs: Ralph Ghoche, Barnard College and Janna Israel, Princeton University Art Museum
Submissions Deadline: August 29, 2025.
Submit 250-word abstract Here: https://caa.confex.com/caa/2026/webprogrampreliminary/meeting.html
Session Abstract: Architecture and the Subterranean Realm
The exploitation of the subterranean world has long provided architecture with a rich palette of materials—metals, stones, and marbles—used to construct and embellish buildings. These underground resources have been integral to colonial expansion across the globe, their extraction directly shaping the architectural landmarks and monuments of Western metropoles. While the pursuit of natural resources has generated immense wealth for speculators and institutions, it has also ravaged local landscapes and impoverished Indigenous populations. The subterranean has thus served as a source of material wealth and a contested battleground in the broader struggle for power and control that defines colonial eras; it has galvanized waves of surveyors and entrepreneurs eager to stake their claim in the earth’s depths. As Frantz Fanon powerfully observed, “Europe has stuffed itself with the gold and raw materials of colonial countries,” using these riches to “raise up her tower of opulence.”
This panel explores the subsoil and its relationship to discourses on land sovereignty and ownership, extraction, labor, and technique, geological and historical time, ecological decay, nature, and power. By examining the ways in which the subterranean has anchored claims of possession, dispossession, and discovery, we seek to explore how perceptions of––and access to––the underground have shaped concepts of architecture, infrastructure, landscape, and territory. Paper proposals may address these themes across historical periods and geographies. Potential inquiries include, but are not limited to: building materials, mining and quarrying, labor codes and legislation, treatises, drawings, survey reports, and maps.
Enquiries: Ralph Ghoche, rg2169@columbia.edu
