Addison Godel

Addison Godel (he/him) is an architectural historian specializing in the twentieth-century United States.  His current research focuses on New York City in the decades just after World War II, using infrastructural building types (telephone exchanges, wholesale markets, sewage treatment plants, etc.) to explore the debates and priorities that shaped larger technological systems. Through these often-overlooked projects, he seeks to more completely understand the forces that shaped the contemporary city, and around whose needs its systems and spaces have been designed.  Other topics of research have included the urban and intellectual geographies of interwar animation, the failure of “mat-building” discourse to accommodate post-Independence architecture in India, and the theorization of race implicit in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chinoiserie.  His work has appeared in Grey Room and CLOG, and together with Jacqueline Gargus and Evan Chakroff, he is the co-author of a book on modern and contemporary architecture in China, intended as a travel guide for students and designers.
 

B.A., The University of Georgia; M.Arch., The Ohio State University; Ph.D. candidate, Columbia University