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. She is the author of Architecture + Choreography: Collaborations in Dance, Space and Time (Routledge 2024). 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. This book builds upon her research that resulted in the Collaborative Legacy of Merce Cunningham exhibition. Beth 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.
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. Pedagogical projects explore urban spaces and design materials through lenses of empire, colony and diaspora; how urban spaces invisible-ize, how states of exception curtail rights of assembly, and rethink architecture and urban social and ecological infrastructures through 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. She is an Associate Professor fo Architecture at the University of Arizona, chairing the Object and Spatial Design Emphasis Areas of the BA DAP (Bachelor of Arts Design Arts & Practices) program; 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).
architecture agency 