About

Chase Galis (he/him/his) researches and writes histories of infrastructure development across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, connecting the history of science and technology with studies of visual culture and environmental history. His work seeks to counter the dominance of the network as a figure in the study of infrastructure by turning to the production of heterogeneous aesthetic regimes across a system’s vast geography. Chase is currently a doctoral candidate and lecturer at ETH Zürich, jointly appointed between the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) and the Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (lus), where his dissertation builds a history of electrical infrastructure in Switzerland by following multiple co-existent cultures of artificial illumination.

Chase is trained as an architect and is also a founding member of the multidisciplinary research and design collective Office Party, for which he was awarded the Architecture League Prize in 2024 with Christina Moushoul and Sonia Sobrino Ralston. He obtained his Master of Architecture degree from the Princeton University School of Architecture in 2021 where he was awarded the History and Theory Prize and a certificate in Media + Modernity. While at Princeton, Chase was an editor of Pidgin and an assistant instructor in the school’s graduate and undergraduate design programs. Chase previously worked as an exhibition designer for institutions including the Amant Foundation and the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and he has worked as a curator leading exhibitions including cover me softly (2024) with Oana Stanescu and Simina Marin and Architecture Arboretum (2019) under Sylvia Lavin. In addition to current writing projects, Chase is also a founding editor of Party Planner, an annual architecture and design publication launched in January 2022.

Chase’s work has been supported by the Legacy Emilio Ambasz Foundation, the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, the High Meadows Environmental Institute, the Keller Center for Innovation in Engineering Education, the Fabian and Nobuko Foundation for Queer and Mixed Heritage, the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH), and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Contact: galis@arch.ethz.ch

Public Programs

Climate Anxiety and Mobilizing in Crisis

Public Lecture Series, ETH Zurich

Select Mondays, February - May 2024

Common language surrounding climate change has invoked the vocabulary of urgency, using words like “crisis" and “emergency" to mobilize the public to fight its contributing factors. While somewhat efficient at motivating action, this discourse has come to induce physiological side effects amongst which climate anxiety stands as one of the most prevalent. The term climate anxiety describes conditions of muscle tension, quickened breathing, and high heart rates attributed to fear of impending environmental disaster. Caught between the discourse of crisis and the looming threat of environmental catastrophe, individuals have been forced to reflect on their own position amid the material and political dimensions of climate change.

Taking the built environment as its field of inquiry, this lecture series moves to better understand how individuals perceive their own subjective positions—their contributions, vulnerabilities, complicities, and anxieties—in the face of impending catastrophe. By shifting analysis between planetary scales and that of the body, we ask in what ways have built form and regulated land structured the way people locate themselves against the effects of climate change? Throughout the series, each guest speaker will present their intervention followed by a roundtable discussion with invited respondents, students, and members of the audience.

Including presentations by Eva Horn, Deborah Coen, Orit Halpern, Carson Chan and Matthew Wagstaffe, Alexander Giesche and Tanja Saban, and Thomas Peter

With responses by Debjani Bhattacharyya, Laurent Stalder, Tomás Bartoletti, Lydia Xynogala, Nitin Bathla, and Gabrielle Schaad

Curatorial Team: Chase Galis and Tatiana Carbonell

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cover me softly

2024 Timișoara Architecture Biennial

cover me softly looks to the cover song as a model for investigating contemporary creative production.

A cover is a musical performance based on an existing recording. Cover also means shelter. To protect or hide. To conceal or disguise, to extend over time or space. To run for cover, to cover one’s back. To work with what’s already there.

The 2024 Beta Architecture Biennial looks beyond notions of copying, stealing, imitating, and bootlegging—that each come with their own ethical slant—offering alternate vocabularies for understanding how knowledge and authorship are circulated in art and design. By centering our vast interconnectedness, cover me softly opens new realms of possibility for doing, making, and being.

Sited in the historic Garrison Command of Timișoara, Romania, the exhibition brings together a wide selection of architects, designers, musicians, artists, activists, photographers, writers, directors, and those that refuse categorization to present their own take on the cover. The works exhibited demonstrate a range of fidelities to the original—some closer to a direct copy, others a distant reference. They reflect on life cycles of ideas and intellectual property as well as that of the material that makes up our built and natural environments, lending important perspectives for addressing architecture’s complicity in ongoing environmental degradation. Fundamental to this question, cover me softly encourages us to take stock of what is in front of us and imagine where we could go from there.

Curatorial Team: Oana Stanescu, Chase Galis, Simina Marin

September 13, 2024 – October 27, 2024

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