Beth Weinstein

Beth Weinstein’s practice and research move between the architectural and the performative, and across scales from drawing to performance-installations to urban interventions, investigating spatial manifestations and invisibilities of political, environmental, and labor issues. Her practice-based doctoral research explored how performances of spatial labor, employing architecture’s instruments (text, drawings and models), can render ‘sensible’ (in)visibilities around architectures of internment. Co-founder of ReSI (Remembering Spaces of Internment), she continues to ask what forms of architecture, and associated invisibilities, are produced through executive order and under states of exception.

Beth has extensively published on performativity in and of public space, theater architecture, and scenography (see publications below). She serves on the advisory editorial board of the Routledge Journal of Theater + Performance Design, and previously served on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education. Her forthcoming book, Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2024) builds upon research that resulted in the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition. Through critical texts, photos and original drawings, Architecture + Choreography examines the artifacts and performance events that emerged through forty collaborations, unpacking the methodologies, concepts, and approaches that pushed the boundaries of participants’ practices.

Beth is a registered architect and founded Architecture Agency in 2002 after more than a decade of practice in the offices of Jean Nouvel, Asymptote, SOM and others. She has coordinated and taught undergraduate and graduate design studios; capstone; critical inquiry; history, theory and techniques of representation; building technologies; and workshop-seminars exploring performance, politics and public space. Recent pedagogical projects explored how urban spaces invisible-ize, how states of exception curtail rights of assembly, and rethink architecture and urban social and ecological infrastructures through the lens of the anthropocene. She has lectured internationally, taught at ENSA Paris-Malaquais, the Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture (ESA), Confluence Institute and Columbia University in Paris, as well as Columbia’s GSAPP, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Pratt Institute, and Parsons/The New School for Design. At the University of Arizona she is a faculty affiliate of the School of Art, of the Social, Cultural, and Critical Theory GIDP (SCCT), and Arizona Institutes for Resilience (AIR).

Courses

• ARC 195b Why Design Matters (BA.DAP)
• ARC 435/535 Forms of Critical Inquiry and Expression
• ARC 451p Architecture + Performance
• ARC 497 Project Inquiry
• ARC 498 Capstone Studio

Select Publications

• Weinstein, B. (2022) Forensics and Fora: Reconstructing and Re-membering the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV), Empower: Proceedings from the 110th ACSA Annual Meeting.
• Weinstein, B. (2020) Performing spatial labour : rendering sensible (in)visibilities around architectures of internment. PhD, Creative Arts and Media, University of Tasmania.
• Weinstein, B. (2020) Installing Performances of Spatial Labour, Platform: Journal of Theatre and Performing Arts 14, 1&2, 117-130.
• Weinstein, B. (2020) Erasing, Obfuscating, and Teasing out from the Shadows: Performing/Installing the Camps’ Invisibilities, Performance Research Journal (PRJ) 24.7: On Disappearance, 23-31. 
• Weinstein, B. (2020) Choreographies of Spatial Labor as Critical Spatial Practice, Critical Practices in Architecture: The Unexamined, Jonathan Bean, Susannah Dickinson, and Aletheia Ida, Editors, Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Weinstein, B. (2019) Performances of Spatial Labor: Rendering the (In)visible Visible, Journal of Architectural Education, Work 73:2, 230-239.
• Weinstein, B. (2018) Bringing Performativity into Architectural Pedagogy, Performing Architectures: Contemporary Projects, Practices and Pedagogies, Andrew Filmer and Juliet Rufford, Editors, Methuen Drama – Engage Series. 
• Weinstein, B.  (2017) Stage and Auditorium, The Routledge Companion to Scenography, Arnold Aronson, Editor. 
• DOUGLAS, M., WEINSTEIN, B and OLIVER, J.  (2015) SHUTTLING, Journal for Artistic Research (JAR), 9, Dec. 2015.
• Weinstein, B. (2013) Turned Tables: Public as Performer in Jean Nouvel’s Pre-Performance Spaces, Architecture as a Performing Art, Marcia F. Feuerstein and Gray Read, Editors, Ashgate Press, 163-176. 
• Ground|Water: The Art, Design + Science of A Dry River. (2012) Ellen McMahon, Ander Monson, and Beth Weinstein, Editors. Tucson : Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry/University of Arizona Press.
• Weinstein, B.  (2012) Performance Space: Distributed and Consolidated, Disappearing Stage: Reflections on the 2011 Prague Quadrennial, Arnold Aronson, Editor, The Theater Institute, 60-73. 
• Weinstein, B. (2013), Performing Architectures: Closed and Open Logics of Mutable Scenes, Performance Research Journal 18.3 : On Scenography. 
• Weinstein, B. (2011), SHiFT: A Performed Re-interpretation of Visionary Theater.  Journal of Architectural Education, 64:2,  87-98.
• Weinstein, B. (2008), Flamand and his Architectural Entourage. Journal of Architectural Education 61:4, 25-33.