Ross Elfline

Education & Professional History

Grinnell College, BA; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, MA; University of California (Los Angeles), PhD

After earning a degree in economics at Grinnell College, I worked in museum education and research at various museums in the Chicago area. From there I went on to earn a master’s degree in Modern Art History, Theory, and Criticism from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where my work concentrated on critical design strategies of the recent past. I then went on to complete my doctoral work at UCLA, where I worked primarily with Miwon Kwon and Sylvia Lavin and completed a dissertation on the Italian Radical Architecture group Superstudio (active 1966-79). At the same time, I worked at the Getty Research Institute and taught at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. I joined the Carleton faculty in 2009, the same year I completed my dissertation.

In my research, I focus on Radical Architecture practices in the 1960s and 70s. In brief, my work seeks to better understand the various means and methods employed by architects in the post-World War II era to “do architecture” while abstaining from building. As such, my writing centers both on how architects of the era sought to expand the definition of architecture by using alternate mediums while at the same time critiquing the discipline itself for its intimate ties to late-stage capitalism and land speculation. I have published widely on the Italian architecture collective Superstudio, specifically on the ways in which their refusal to build was consistent with autonomist labor movements in Italy at the time. In 2015 I was a lead consultant on the Walker Art Center’s important exhibition of counterculture architecture and design “Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia.” My research has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Arts.

My current book project, titled “Common Ground, Common Time: Architectural Performance in the 1960s and 70s” considers the intersection of architecture and performance in the neo-avant-garde era. By focusing both on architects who engaged in time-based performance and performance artists who intervened critically into the built environment of the city, I argue that the medium of the “architectural performance” became a critical tool for questioning the power dynamics that inhere in public civic spaces. Through such interventions into urban space, a collaborative sense of the common was carved out amidst rapidly privatized spaces.