Baumer Lecture Series, Todd Gannon

Engaging the Commons -- The Knowlton School Spring 2023 Baumer Lecture Series

The Knowlton School invites practitioners and scholars to think about how the design professions’ particpate in (and with) the dense social and political webs of the built environment, and how active practices might engage these places—our “commons.”

Todd Gannon is a professor of architecture at The Ohio State University’s Knowlton School, where he was head of the architecture section from 2017 to 2022. He has held the Robert S. Livesey Professorship at the Knowlton School, is currently the Cass Gilbert Visiting Professorship at the University of Minnesota, and has taught at Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, and SCI-Arc. 

Gannon’s research focuses on the history and theory of late 20th-century and contemporary architecture. He is the author of Figments of the Architectural Imagination (2022) and Reyner Banham and the Paradoxes of High Tech (2017), and the editor of The Light Construction Reader (2002), Et in Suburbia Ego: José Oubrerie’s Miller House (2013), Craig Hodgetts’s Swimming to Suburbia (2018), and monographs on the work of Peter Eisenman, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Morphosis, Eric Owen Moss, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Mack Scogin/Merrill Elam Architects, Bernard Tschumi, and UN Studio. His essays have appeared in The Routledge Handbook for Architecture Design and Practice (2015), The SAGE Handbook for Architectural Theory (2012), The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism (2007), and in periodicals including The Architect’s Newspaper, Domus, Harvard Design Magazine, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Log. In collaboration with Ewan Branda and Andrew Zago, he curated the 2013 exhibition A Confederacy of Heretics. Currently, he is researching a monograph on the work of Franklin D. Israel. 

Gannon holds undergraduate and graduate degrees from the Knowlton School and a Ph.D. from UCLA. A registered architect, he has practiced with Acock Associates Architects in Columbus and was a senior associate at Kovac Architects in Los Angeles. He has lectured at institutions across the United States, Europe, and Asia, and is a frequent conference participant and jurist. He has served on the boards of directors of AIA Ohio and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. His work has been recognized and supported by the Graham Foundation, the Getty Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Institute of Architects, the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, The Ohio State University, and UCLA.