Albert L. Refiti’s research centers around the Moananui (Polynesian) and broader Oceania notions of space and time (vā/wā). His time at the Bard Graduate Center focuses on archival data and living testimony about building forms and practices, to complete a book that traces common elements and establishes a baseline for properly articulating the historic and current links between Moananui buildings and contemporary architectural practice. To that end, the research aims to establish a genealogy of Moananui and Oceanic buildings to distill the common ancestry of building designs and the practices of expert artisans, such as tufuga, kahuna, and tōhunga. This extends and consolidates a record of the distribution of Oceanic built forms and their use to identify factors that contribute to contemporary renaissances in Indigenous architecture in the region. Refiti is the coeditor of The Handbook of Contemporary Indigenous Architecture (Springer, 2018), Pacific Spaces: Translations and Transmutations (Berghahn, 2022), and The Concept of Vā: Relationality, Time and Space in the Pacific and Beyond (ANU Press, forthcoming). The fellowship will culminate in the production of a manuscript for a book titled Cosmogonic Artefacts: Spatial Exposition of Pacific Architecture.
Albert L. Refiti
Visiting Fellow, Fall 2025
Visiting Faculty and Fellows