As part of the UIC Institute for the Humanities’ Faculty Fellow Lecture Series, Francesco Marullo, Associate Professor at the school, will present Making a Little Go a Long Way: The Architecture of Estrangement on October 6, 2026.
Not all architecture wants us to feel at home. Marullo’s lecture asks when making domestic intimacy strange can produce critical distance—and when it merely entertains. It begins with a 1931 conversation between Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin about dwelling after the bourgeois interior. Benjamin found an answer in traceless surfaces of glass and steel, and the tabula rasa of the concrete frame. Brecht turned to the nomadic guest, whose presence unsettles habitual relations to objects and space. Following Brecht’s theatrical method of estrangement, the lecture moves to Chicago, the distant metropolis where his plays exposed capitalism’s effects on everyday life. There, the steel frame converted openness into speculation, experimental glass houses marketed mobility, and residential hotels organized transient dwelling within fireproof concrete structures. These architectures define estrangement not as novelty or discomfort, but as a project of distance: making the spatial and economic conventions of dwelling perceptible, questionable, and open to transformation.
Tuesday, October 6, 2026, 4–5:30 pm
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
1007 W. Harrison St.
Chicago, IL 60607
Francesco Marullo is Associate Professor at the UIC School of Architecture. His research interrogates the relations between space, labor, and production through the multiple forms of the architectural project—from words to drawings, from abstraction to construction.
For accessibility accommodations, contact huminst@uic.edu.
Image credits:1. Bertolt Brecht, Im Dickicht der Städte, cover of the first edition, 1927. © Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin. Courtesy of the Bertolt Brecht Archiv.
2. Bertolt Brecht, Im Dickicht der Städte, photograph of State Street, probably 1926. Copyright 1927 by Propylaen-Verlag, Berlin. Courtesy of Bertolt Brecht Archiv.