Short Bio
Jordan H. Carver is a transdisciplinary scholar working across architecture, race, nationalism, politics, sovereignty, and abolition. Jordan is director of the Master of Architecture II, Design Research program at the Yale School of Architecture. His books include Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (UR, 2018) and America Recovered (Actar, 2019), written with photographer Chad Ress. His essays and other writings have been published widely. His current project, Leviathan’s Scaffolding, considers state sovereignty within discourses of whiteness and spatial violence.
Photo by Paul Barbera
Full CV
Yale Faculty Page
Full Bio
Jordan H. Carver is a writer, educator, designer, and cultural historian based in New York. He directs the Master of Architecture II, Design Research program at the Yale School of Architecture. His transdisciplinary work investigates space, law, race, sovereignty, political rhetoric, conservatism, media, tax havenry, gun violence, and abolitionist futures. He is currently developing two manuscripts. The first reconsiders the figure of the Leviathan within discourses of race, violence, and whiteness. The second traces the layering and accumulation of architectural objects on the US-Mexico boundary and how images of borderland landscapes and populations mediate American racial formation and nationalist political narratives.
Jordan is a co-author of America Recovered (Actar, 2019), a collaboration with photographer Chad Ress, photography historian Miriam Paeslack, and political theorist Bonnie Honig on the aesthetics of civic engagement. His book Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (Urban Research), on secret prisons and the War on Terror, was published in 2018 and won an AIGA design award.
Jordan has served as the managing editor for Theory & Event, a founding editor of the Avery Review, and is currently a core member of Who Builds Your Architecture? an advocacy group working to educate architects on the effects of globalization and labor. He was the KPF Visiting Scholar for two years (2022–2024) at Yale School of Architecture, the 2014–2015 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo, and a Henry M. MacCracken Doctoral Fellow in American Studies while at New York University. His work has been supported by the Graham Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). In 2015, he was a MacDowell Colony fellow.
Jordan edited Preservation is Overtaking Us by Rem Koolhaas and Jorge Otero-Pailos (GSAPP Books, 2014) and with the Avery Review he co-edited And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency and Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (both published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City). With Mabel O. Wilson Jordan has contributed chapters to The Architect as Worker (Bloomsbury, 2015) edited by Peggy Deamer and The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor (OR Books, 2015) edited by Andrew Ross. His essays have been published in Thresholds, ARPA Journal, PLAT, Pidgin, Volume, and Bracket, and his work exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial, Storefront for Art and Architecture, DESTE Foundation, Van Alen Institute, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA).
Jordan holds a doctorate in American Studies from NYU and received both his Masters of Architecture (M.Arch) and Masters of Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (MS. CCCP) from Columbia University GSAPP.
Jordan H. Carver is a writer, educator, designer, and cultural historian based in New York. He directs the Master of Architecture II, Design Research program at the Yale School of Architecture. His transdisciplinary work investigates space, law, race, sovereignty, political rhetoric, conservatism, media, tax havenry, gun violence, and abolitionist futures. He is currently developing two manuscripts. The first reconsiders the figure of the Leviathan within discourses of race, violence, and whiteness. The second traces the layering and accumulation of architectural objects on the US-Mexico boundary and how images of borderland landscapes and populations mediate American racial formation and nationalist political narratives.
Jordan is a co-author of America Recovered (Actar, 2019), a collaboration with photographer Chad Ress, photography historian Miriam Paeslack, and political theorist Bonnie Honig on the aesthetics of civic engagement. His book Spaces of Disappearance: The Architecture of Extraordinary Rendition (Urban Research), on secret prisons and the War on Terror, was published in 2018 and won an AIGA design award.
Jordan has served as the managing editor for Theory & Event, a founding editor of the Avery Review, and is currently a core member of Who Builds Your Architecture? an advocacy group working to educate architects on the effects of globalization and labor. He was the KPF Visiting Scholar for two years (2022–2024) at Yale School of Architecture, the 2014–2015 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the University at Buffalo, and a Henry M. MacCracken Doctoral Fellow in American Studies while at New York University. His work has been supported by the Graham Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA). In 2015, he was a MacDowell Colony fellow.
Jordan edited Preservation is Overtaking Us by Rem Koolhaas and Jorge Otero-Pailos (GSAPP Books, 2014) and with the Avery Review he co-edited And Now: Architecture Against a Developer Presidency and Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary (both published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City). With Mabel O. Wilson Jordan has contributed chapters to The Architect as Worker (Bloomsbury, 2015) edited by Peggy Deamer and The Gulf: High Culture/Hard Labor (OR Books, 2015) edited by Andrew Ross. His essays have been published in Thresholds, ARPA Journal, PLAT, Pidgin, Volume, and Bracket, and his work exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2014 Istanbul Design Biennial, Storefront for Art and Architecture, DESTE Foundation, Van Alen Institute, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA).
Jordan holds a doctorate in American Studies from NYU and received both his Masters of Architecture (M.Arch) and Masters of Critical, Curatorial, and Conceptual Practices in Architecture (MS. CCCP) from Columbia University GSAPP.