Dean Carol Becker Featured in Columbia Global Centers' University Leadership Series

By
Angeline Dimambro
April 29, 2021

Carol Becker, Professor and Dean of Columbia University School of the Arts, joined Amale Andraos, Professor and Dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP); and Rui Costa, Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology and Director and CEO of Columbia’s Zuckerman Institute, for Columbia Global Centers’ latest event in their University Leadership Series. Together with Safwan M. Masri, Professor and Executive Vice President for Global Centers and Global Development, Becker, Andraos, and Costa met to discuss how architecture, art, and neuroscience not only shape thought, but also imagine the future.

Becker received her PhD in English and American Literature from the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of numerous articles and several books including: The Invisible Drama: Women and the Anxiety of Change (Prentice Hall & IBD, 1987); The Subversive Imagination: Artists, Society and Social Responsibility (Routledge, 1994); Zones of Contention: Essays on Art, Institutions, Gender, and Anxiety (State University of New York Press, 1996); Surpassing the Spectacle: Global Transformations and the Changing Politics of Art (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production (Paradigm Publishers/Routledge, 2009); and her most recent long essay/memoir, Losing Helen (Red Hen Press, 2016). She travels widely, often lecturing on art, artists, their place in society, and feminist theory. She works closely with the World Economic Forum’s program on art, culture, and leadership.

Andraos, who is the co-founder of WORKac, a New York-based firm that focuses on architectural projects that reinvent the relationship between urban and natural environments, is committed to design research and her writings have focused on climate change and its impact on architecture as well as on the question of representation in the age of global practice. Her recent publications include We’ll Get There When We Cross That Bridge (Monacelli Press, 2017), Architecture and Representation: the Arab City (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2015) co-edited with Nora Akawi, 49 Cities (Inventory Press, 2015), and Above the Pavement, the Farm! (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010) in collaboration with Dan Wood. She has taught at numerous institutions including Princeton, Harvard, and the American University in Beirut.

Costa studies the brain mechanisms that guide behavior—both innate and learned. Specifically, he examines the brain circuitry that underlies spontaneous movement, and compares it to the circuitry involved in movement that has been learned over time. He hopes to apply this understanding to finding better ways to treat disorders of movement, such as Parkinson's disease. His numerous publications include “Complementary Contributions of Striatal Projection Pathways to Action Initiation and Execution” (2016) and “Endocannabinoid Modulation of Orbitostriatal Circuits Gates Habit Formation” (2016). He sees action as the purpose of the brain and mind—we are always trying new things whether in action or thought, and shaping behavior based on the consequences.

The University Leadership Series was developed by the Global Centers to connect international students who are dispersed around the world with the University. As Masri noted, the programming series is a key part of Columbia’s broader mission to enhance Columbia’s engagement with the world and the exchange of global knowledge. Over 250 attendees, calling in from across the globe, joined live for the virtual event. 

In his opening remarks, Masri offered a framing perspective for why these three disciplines in particular were brought together: “Evolutionary biologists once seemed to indicate that art and design were almost an appendage unnecessary to human survival, and, therefore, the last fields to arise after the brain developed language and numeracy. More recent theories make the case that art and design are instinctive, a part of our brain from the very beginning...Art, design, and architecture express and allow us to share material truths that we have no other language for, that speak in form, in color, volume, movement, arrangement, and, as such, elicit responses that are both conscious and unconscious, keeping us engaged with one another and with our collective identity.”

Becker, Costa, and Andraos each shared their individual journeys to finding their place inside their respective disciplines. As each wanted to impress upon the many students who were in the audience, not only were none of their paths straightforward or linear, but they also included uncertainty and exploration along the way. Becker, who earned a PhD in literature, originally wanted to be a literature critic. It wasn’t until her time at the Art Institute of Chicago that Becker discovered her own love of writing.

“I just fell in love with art school,” Becker said. “I loved, and this relates to both Amale’s world and Rui’s, that I felt like I was in a studio. I was in a lab. I was in a place that was an experimental institution completely devoted to process. It was a bit wild and it was a bit wacky, and it wasn’t the university [setting]. I thought it was stupendous, because you could keep reinventing yourself. That was the idea—that you could try anything. Instead of writing my first book, as I was probably supposed to do, about 19th century American literature, I wrote my first book on women, anxiety, and change.”

Andraos, similar to Becker, felt at home once she arrived at architecture school. “It was a place where I could bring all these pieces and parts [of myself] together,” Andraos said. “I was very interested in arts, but I was also very interested in psychoanalysis and the unconscious—the intuitive and emotional side of knowledge. Having lived in so many places, I found that architecture could allow me to be inside and outside at the same time and connect the mind and the body.” Andraos also shared how she values how architecture, unlike other fields or disciplines, does not demand binaries or absolutes, and instead invites multiplicities. “Architecture and design have a capacity to hold things together, even if they are not resolved. It was home. I could bring the personal, the global, and the past, as well as imagine the future.”

Speaking more about the act of imagining the future, Costa had an important and unique insight to offer to the conversation: “I study this in my own lab, how, with the brain, we learn from consequence. There’s a time window for which we learn things very well, but then as things dissipate in time, we don’t...If the temporal window is very long, we cannot see the consequence, and so cannot learn. Let’s take the example of climate change: we cannot see the consequence, so art and architecture, they can bring an immediacy. They can bring you a representation of that consequence—’here is how it will look’—imagined, in a film, and then, all of a sudden, it can make you learn now based on the imagined future...When you learn to play tennis, you see the ball land on the other side and you either did it correctly or not. Imagine that the ball lands 50 years later. How are you going to learn? If someone says, ‘I’m going to bring you that ball from the future and show it to you right now, in this building, in this painting, in this book, in this movie,’ that is what is so important and so inspiring.”

Watch the complete conversation here and browse through the upcoming events hosted by Columbia Global Centers.

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