C. Greig Crysler completed his professional training in architecture at the University of Waterloo, Canada and the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London, UK. He teaches courses in the History, Theory and Society of Architecture. Through his leadership as Arcus Chair (2012-2022) and his role as Program Director of the CED’s Arcus Endowment, Crysler has translated his commitment to equity and social justice in design education into frameworks for student and faculty engagement, public discussion and alternative forms of pedagogy related to issues such as dispossession, queer theory, and activism. In recognition of his efforts, he received the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity in 2017.
Crysler’s research focuses on two areas of investigation. The first examines the institutions and practices of architectural theory in the context of the changing social, economic and political forces of the global present. Crysler’s book, Writing Spaces: Discourses of Architecture, Urbanism and the Built Environment (Routledge, 2003) examines emerging debates around globalization and transnational cultural processes, as they emerged in a range of journals between 1960 and 2000, and considers their implications for architectural theory. These arguments are developed further in the interdisciplinary and cross-cultural Handbook of Architectural Theory (Sage, 2012), which he co-edited with Hilde Heynen and Stephen Cairns.
A second area of area research operates at the intersection of space, power and identity through case studies of architecture and cities. Recent publications include his 2019 book, Spaces of Fear: Bodies, Walls, Cities (co-edited with Maria Moreno Carranco, was published in 2019 by Publicaciones UACHE of the Universidad Autónoma Metroplitana, in Mexico City; English language edition, 2021), which examines the relationship between embodiment, affect and the aesthetics of fear in North American cities. A second collection, also co-edited with Moreno Carranco, entitled Mexico City: Materiality, Performance and Power, was developed as part of a year-long teaching program led by Crysler through UC Berkeley’s Global Urban Humanities Initiative. A sequence of material conditions (earth, water, concrete, pigment, blood, waste and rubble) provides the framework for situated histories of Mexico City.
He is also co-author, with cultural geographer Shiloh Krupar, of the forthcoming Territories of Exaction: Austerity, Bias, and Dross. The book uses an innovative combination of text and original images to examine how historical practices of debt, racial capitalism, and waste relations in the colonial extra-territories of the US continue today, through case studies of graduated sovereignty in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Jefferson County, Alabama and Camden, New Jersey.
C. Greig was an ARC Fellow in Spring 2014 – he was chosen in the Faculty Fellow category.