About

Jorge Otero-Pailos is a faculty member at Columbia GSAPP. His work involves architectural research and practice, with a focus on historic preservation and architectural technology. He is involved in academic activities, including the Fitch Colloquium and the Future Anterior Journal, and contributes to the development of programs and initiatives within the school. His expertise and contributions are recognized through his participation in various lectures and scholarly publications, emphasizing his role in advancing architectural discourse and preservation.

Research topics

• History
• Art
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Computer architecture
• Philosophy
• Archaeology
• Art history
• Engineering
• Aesthetics
• Geography
• Visual arts
• Law

Selected publications

• Provenance in Architecture: A Dictionary

  2025-11-12

  book

  The provenance of artworks is a burning issue in current scholarship and politics. Transpose provenance into architecture and it reveals new and surprising dimensions in the social, material and cultural lives of buildings and architectural artefacts, reframing questions of migration, movement and circulation. Provenance in architecture illuminates the intricate trajectories of fundamentally composite objects from their complex origins to their uncertain destinations. This dictionary examines architectural provenance across 101 key concepts from “Acquisition” to “Will”. The entries provide new ways of writing architectural history, highlighting how architecture moves, is destroyed, survives and is transformed.

  PublisherDOI

• Repairing Architecture Schools

  Places · 2024

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer architecture
  • Computer Science
  PublisherDOI

• Smell, History, and Heritage

  The American Historical Review · 2022 · 12 citations

  • Sociology
  • History
  • Aesthetics

  Journal Article Smell, History, and Heritage Get access William Tullett, William Tullett Email: william.tullett@aru.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Inger Leemans, Inger Leemans Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Hsuan Hsu, Hsuan Hsu Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Stephanie Weismann, Stephanie Weismann Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Cecilia Bembibre, Cecilia Bembibre Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Melanie A Kiechle, Melanie A Kiechle Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Duane Jethro, Duane Jethro Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Anna Chen, Anna Chen Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Xuelei Huang, Xuelei Huang Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jorge Otero-Pailos, Jorge Otero-Pailos Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar ... Show more Mark Bradley Mark Bradley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 1, March 2022, Pages 261–309, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac147 Published: 26 April 2022

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Ethics of dust: visual essay on the artistic works by Jorge Otero-Pailos

  The Journal of Architecture · 2022-05-19 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  The works of artist and preservation architect Jorge Otero-Pailos on experimental preservation provoke deep reflections about some of the fundamental questions dealing with heritage: temporality of objects, changeability of inscribed cultural values, the greater purpose of architectural preservation as a cultural practice, and the societal role of an architect and preservationist in formulating narratives around heritage. As the artistic installations featured in this visual essay — The Ethics of Dust (2014–2016) and Watershed Moment (2020) — demonstrate, Jorge Otero-Pailos combines various elusive elements, such as water sounds and dust, to conceive meditative and contemplative spaces. His installations invite visitors to pause and reflect on the memories, both personal, social, and environmental, that define each of us; they probe deep into the past and deep into the future.<br/><br/>Since these are some of the issues we wanted to explore in this special issue, ‘Embodiment and Meaning-making: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Heritage Architecture’, we invited various artists and scholars to write a very short caption in reaction to the images provided by the author through one of these three ‘lenses’:<br/><br/>- affect, embodied experience, atmosphere;<br/><br/>- politics of heritage;<br/><br/>- processes of meaning-making.<br/><br/>The results reveal the power of images to provoke imagination through atmospheric and embodied experiences, and the power of experimental heritage work to convey (political) meaning across distance and different analogue or digital media.<br/><br/>This visual essay includes contributions from (in order of appearance): Tenna Doktor Olsen Tvedebrink, Federico De Matteis, Michael Hirschbichler, Jovana Popić, Maria De Piedade Ferreira, Uta Pottgiesser, Marcus Weisen and Brady Wagoner, with an epilogue from Jorge Otero-Pailos.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rehaciendo el patrimonio arquitectónico controvertido, repensando el espacio público

  ZARCH · 2021-09-13

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Como parte de la gestión del patrimonio controvertido, entendido como aquel asociado a episodios históricos cuestionables éticamente, u objeto de controversia en la sociedad actual, debe incluirse también la de edificios y espacios públicos. Estos pueden ser tanto lugares patrimoniales, como espacios que alojan monumentos en la actualidad, o aquellos en los que se producen movimientos sociales derivados de dichos episodios históricos. Este número de Zarch recoge ensayos que examinan nuevas formas de rehacer dicho patrimonio arquitectónico controvertido, a través del marco conceptual de la conservación experimental, y que conciben el patrimonio como un tercer ámbito creativo y dinámico de interacciones reales e imaginarias, físicas y emocionales, tecnológicas y sociales entre objetos y sujetos implicados en procesos de crear futuros.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Heritage” in Color by Countee Cullen (review)

  Future Anterior Journal of Historic Preservation History Theory and Criticism · 2021

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Art history
  • History

  Reviewed by: “Heritage” in Color by Countee Cullen Jorge Otero-Pailos (bio) Countee Cullen “Heritage,” in Color. New York: Harper & Bros., 1925. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The Salem United Methodist Church in Harlem, New York, was the site of numerous events for central figures of the Harlem Renaissance. Among them were the 1928 wedding of Countee Cullen and Yolande Du Bois, a noted occasion where many of New York’s well-to-do Black residents flaunted their best fashion, and the funeral of poet James Weldon Johnson in 1938. Since its founding in 1881 as a mission to St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, the church had moved several times across Upper Manhattan. This building was purchased in 1923, when the congregation that had been located there, Calvary Methodist Episcopal Church, moved to the Bronx. Such a trajectory speaks to the importance of recognizing how Black individuals, communities, and organizations can repurpose existing buildings to their own needs—a group need not have financed or planned a building’s construction to make use of its space and become attached to it. Beyond My Ken, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. [End Page 96] Countee Cullen (1903–1946) is one of America’s most famous modern poets. He lived and died during “Jim Crow,” an era spanning from the end of Reconstruction in 1877 until the Civil Rights movements of the mid 1960s, during which the White majority enacted laws to uphold a racial caste system that treated Blacks as second-class citizens.1 To shore up these laws, White supremacists in every profession, from academics to preachers, medical doctors, social Darwinists disseminated false theories about Black People being innately inferior to White People.2 Across popular culture, from cinema to children’s toys, stereotypes abounded openly denigrating Black culture as uncivilized.3 Cullen challenged this oppression through his poetry, affirming the self-worth of Black American heritage, and claiming its rightful place in American society. Born Countee LeRoy Porter, Cullen was raised in New York City’s Harlem by his grandmother, who died when he was a fifteen-year-old minor. He took the last name of his adopted parents, the prominent Reverend Frederick A. Cullen (1868–1946), pastor of Harlem’s largest Episcopal congregation, and Carolyn Belle Mitchell (d. 1932), both civil rights activists.4 Under their care, Cullen excelled academically and began winning poetry contests first as a high school student, then at New York University. By the time he graduated college in 1925, and before going on to pursue a masters in English at Harvard University, he had already published his first collection of poems, Color, which included “Heritage,” the poem that would make him famous for its celebration of Black culture and its condemnation of racism. His poems also appeared in The New Negro (1925), edited by Alain Locke (1885–1954); a defining anthology that captured the intellectual and artistic spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, a movement that initiated new research on Black history, confronted stereotypes, fought for social justice, and invented artistic forms such as jazz.5 Cullen contributed to a new understanding of poetry, and by extension intangible oral traditions, as a form of heritage. Poetry could transmit the memories of embodied cultural practices, rituals, and even the modest vernacular places where they took place. It could simultaneously denounce the pernicious legacy of slavery, which among its many horrible practices included attempting to erase those cultural memories. His [End Page 97] stanzas expressed the hopeful sense that cultural knowledge could endure through poetic recitation. Significantly, when Cullen wrote “Heritage” there were no government-owned sites in the United States expressly associated with Black Americans. The glaring omission was one way in which the structural racism of the Jim Crow era manifested itself in the preservation profession. As a teenager, Cullen witnessed the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (his father was president of the NAACP’s Harlem branch) organize a national campaign to preserve the modest home of a famous Black poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), in Dayton, Ohio. As prominent Black intellectuals, including W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) and Booker T. Washington...

  PublisherDOI

• Hacia una poligrafía de la arquitectura contemporánea

  Ra Revista de Arquitectura · 2018-05-10

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  La historiografía suele categorizar a la arquitectura acudiendo a periodos cronológicos, ámbitos políticos, geográficos, e incluso climáticos, centrándose en arquitectos concretos o en grupos auto-seleccionados, afiliaciones mutuas, etc. Es decir, el enfoque de estudio suele ser monográfico, no necesariamente el mejor modo de categorizar la historia de las ideas arquitectónicas. El presente artículo desarrolla la idea de un nuevo enfoque poligráfico que tenga en cuenta límites menos cerrados, inter-generacionales y de múltiples capas de significados.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Introduction to the Special Issue on Preservation and War Freedom from Violence

  Future Anterior Journal of Historic Preservation History Theory and Criticism · 2017-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism - Volume 14, Number 1, Summer 2017

  PublisherDOI

• Smell and Preservation

  Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) · 2016-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Future Anterior: Journal of Historic Preservation History, Theory, and Criticism - Volume 13, Number 2, Winter 2016

  Publisher

• Experimental Preservation

  Places · 2016-09-13 · 31 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Uta Pottgiesser

  Delft University of Technology

  4 shared

• Maria da Piedade Ferreira

  Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences

  4 shared

• Jovana Popić

  University of Zagreb

  4 shared

• Michael Hirschbichler

  4 shared

• Federico De Matteis

  4 shared

• Aron Vinegar

  3 shared

• Brady Wagoner

  Aalborg University

  2 shared

• Tenna Doktor Olsen Tvedebrink

  Aalborg University

  2 shared

Labs

• Preservation Technology LabPI

Awards & honors

• Onera Prize for Historic Preservation