Ife Salema Vanable
Ph.D. Candidate, Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University
Ife Salema Vanable is an architect, theorist, and historian who holds professional and post-professional degrees in architecture from Cornell and Princeton Universities. Ife is founder and leader of i/van/able, a New York based architectural workshop and think tank. She is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union and a Ph.D. candidate in architectural history and theory at Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). Her scholarly work asks questions of and seeks to unearth complex and seemingly banal relationships between the design of multi-family housing, municipal government machinations for its development, conceptions of racial difference, geography, finance, program, and family composition. This work engages histories of the private development of low-moderate income housing in the form of high-rise residential towers in 1970s New York under the program known as Mitchell-Lama. In this context, Ife studies modes of black subjectivity and dwelling in tall buildings, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home.
Working Group Affiliation