Rafael Moneo
Opening Keynote: The urgency of 'other' histories today
ETSAM Conference Hall. Wednesday June 15th, 18:30
Rafael Moneo was born in Tudela, Spain, in 1937. He graduated in 1961 from the Architecture School of Madrid. Professor in the Architecture Schools of Barcelona and Madrid, he was appointed Chairman of the Architecture Department of the Harvard University Graduate School of Design where he is now Emeritus Josep Lluis Sert Professor in Architecture.
Notable among Rafael Moneo’s works are the National Museum of Roman Art in Mérida, the Kursaal Auditorium and Congress Center in San Sebastián, the Museums of Modern Art and Architecture in Stockholm, Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral in Los Angeles or the Extension to the Prado Museum in Madrid.
He combines his professional activity with that as lecturer, critic and theoretician. His book Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects has been translated in 8 languages.
Member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts of Spain since 1997 and elected Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2013, has been awarded numerous distinctions among them the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in 1996, the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in 2003, the Prince of Asturias Prize in the Arts in 2012, the National Prize for Architecture in 2015, the Praemium Imperiale by the Japan Art Association in 2017 and more recently, in 2021, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale.
Claudia Hopkins
Keynote Lecture: Al-Andalus in Translation. Controversies and Debates
COAM Conference Hall. Thursday June 16th, 18:00
The architectural legacy of al-Andalus has cast a long shadow on debates surrounding Spain’s national identity and history, conservation, museology, design, architecture, commerce and tourism to this day. Its most well-preserved buildings have been translated into many forms and media, from Owen Jones’ Alhambra court in the Crystal Palace in Sydenham in 1854 via the fin-de-siècle replica of the Giralda in Madison Square Garden, New York, to the creation of state-of-the art facsimiles of mudéjar architecture in the recently established ‘Spanish Gallery’ in County Durham, UK. This lecture is not intended to provide a systematic survey of examples of such reconstructions, but rather it will tease out the ideological issues that motivated appropriations of Andalusí heritage in the twentieth century. Over-familiar assumptions about Western attitudes that exclude Islamic heritage from Western identity will be challenged.
After Modesto Cendoya’s uninspired replica of the Alhambra at the Universal Exhibition in Brussels in 1910, Spanish interest in Andalusí architecture developed in different spheres, often in strongly politicised contexts. In the early Francoist period, it loomed large in the colonial rhetoric of a ‘Spanish-Moroccan brotherhood’ and ‘eternal convivencia’ expressed, for instance, in official art exhibitions in Madrid a few years before Moroccan independence. Andalusí heritage too was mobilised as soft power to impress the International Federation of Landscape Architects during a tour of the gardens in Seville, Granada, and Cordoba. In contrast, the experimental filmmaker José Val del Omar produced a deeply disorientating vision of the Alhambra in 1953. By then the reflections by a group of modernist architects, led by Fernando Chueca Goitia, culminated in the Alhambra Manifesto, a landmark in the re-evaluation of the Nasrid complex as ‘pure architecture’ in order to forge a new path for a modern Spanish architecture. Although the political agendas of these interventions differ, the common denominator is the search for a national identity through architecture. This issue continued to drive the narratives around Andalusí heritage developed and contested in the early twenty-first century.
Claudia Hopkins is Professor and Director of the Zurbarán Centre for Spanish and Latin American Art at Durham University, UK. Before joining Durham in 2020, she was Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century Hispanic art and visual culture, in particular in relation to constructs of self and other, and processes of translation. She is curator of the recent exhibition Romantic Spain. David Roberts and Genaro Pérez Villaamil (Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Oct. 2021-Jan. 2022). She is co-editor, with Iain Boyd Whyte of the anthology Hot Art, Cold War–Western and Northern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 / Southern and Eastern European Writing on American Art 1945-1990 (Routledge, 2020, 2 vols). Her book The Orient Within: Spanish Art and Identity 1833-1956 is forthcoming. She is Associate Editor of the Getty-funded journal Art in Translation.
Hilde Heynen
Closing Lecture: EAHN22 Summation
COAM Conference Hall. Thursday June 16th, 17:00
Hilde Heynen is a professor of architectural theory at the University of Leuven, Belgium. Her research focuses on issues of modernity, modernism and gender in architecture. She is the author of Architecture and Modernity. A Critique (MIT Press, 1999) and of Sibyl Moholy-Nagy. Architecture, Modernism and its Discontent (Bloomsbury, 2019). She also co-edited the volumes Back from Utopia. The Challenge of the Modern Movement (010, 2001), Negotiating Domesticity. Spatial productions of gender in modern architecture (Routledge, 2005), The Handbook Architectural Theory (Sage, 2012) and Making Home(s) in Displacement (LUP, 2022).