Ife Vanable
Ife Vanable is an Assistant Professor of Architecture and affiliate faculty in American Studies. Ife earned a professional B.Arch from Cornell University and a post-professional M.Arch II from Princeton University. Her Ph.D. in Architectural History and Theory from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) is near complete. Her scholarly work asks questions of and seeks to unearth complex and seemingly banal relationships between multi-family housing design in the United States, municipal government schemes for its development, geography, finance, legal rhetoric, public policy, family composition, and conceptions of racial difference. This work specifically engages histories of publicly funded and incentivized, though privately developed and managed, high-rise residential towers erected in New York, under the 1955 Limited Profit Housing Companies Law, known as Mitchell-Lama. In this context Ife studies modes of blackness and dwelling in tall buildings, the performance of domesticity and respectability, and the politics, aesthetics, and materiality of the making of home.
For her ongoing research, writing, and design work, Ife has received numerous awards, prizes, and fellowships, including a History and Theory Prize from the Princeton University School of Architecture, a Columbia University Buell Center Fellowship, an inaugural Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC) Prize, a Yale University Presidential Visiting Fellowship, and an award from the Yale Whitney Humanities Center’s Griswold Faculty Research Fund.
Ife’s writing and musings have been published in the Avery Review, Places Journal, and SSENSE Magazine, and she is co-editor of the forthcoming volume Black Production and the Space of the University.
At Yale, Ife’s offerings in both the College and the School of Architecture explore histories, contradictions, and desires that have historically and continue to exist around U.S. federal, state, and municipal urban housing policy, including a course called Groundlessness that troubles and complicates the grounds and grounding(s) of urban and environmental imaginaries, asking questions about relationships between blackness, land, and modernity, and the difficulty with imagining folks racialized as black holding a position up in the sky.
In addition to Yale University’s School of Architecture, Ife has taught at The Cooper Union and Columbia University GSAPP.
Publications:
Ife Vanable, “Working the Middle: Harlem River Park Towers and Waterside Plaza,” in the Avery Review 30 (March 2018), https://averyreview.com/issues/30/working-the-middle.
Ife Vanable, “Death to Design Activism. Let it rest,” Field Notes on Design Activism 5, Places Journal, November 2022, https://doi.org/10.22269/221115.
Ife Salema Vanable, Diana Jean Sandoval Martinez, Omar Gandhi, and Zeina Koreitem, “Unmeasurables: a Conversation About Architecture, Four Experts on the Intimacy of Space,” By Oana Stănescu, SSense, online, https://www.ssense.com/en-tw/editorial/culture/unmeasurables-a-conversation-about-architecture.