Sessions

Call for Papers

Submission deadline: September 6, 2021

Extended deadline: September 20, 2021

Abstracts are invited for the sessions and round tables listed below by September 20, 2021. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted through the conference platform, along with the applicant’s name, email address, professional affiliation, address, telephone number and a short curriculum vitae (one page, PDF format).

Sessions

Sessions will consist of either five papers or four papers and a respondent, with time for dialogue and questions at the end. Each paper should be limited to a 20-minute presentation. Abstracts for presentations should define the subject and summarize the argument to be presented in the proposed paper. The content of that paper should be the product of well-documented original research that is primarily analytical and interpretative rather than descriptive in nature.

Round Tables

Round tables will consist of five to ten participants and an extended time for dialogue, debate and discussion among chair(s) and the public. Each discussant will have 10 minutes to present a position. Abstracts for round table debates should summarize the position to be taken in the discussion.

Papers may not have been previously published, nor presented in public. Only one submission per author will be accepted. No one may act both as chair of a session/round table and as a speaker/discussant in another session/round table. All abstracts will be held in confidence during the selection process. In addition to the 20 thematic sessions and 5 round tables listed below, open sessions may be announced. With the author’s approval, thematic session chairs may choose to recommend for inclusion in an open session an abstract that was submitted to, but does not fit into, a thematic session.

Session and round table chairs will notify all persons submitting abstracts of the acceptance or rejection of their proposals and comment on them by November 15, 2021. All chairs have the prerogative to recommend changes to the abstract in order to coordinate it with a session or round table program. The selected speakers must return edited abstracts to chairs no later than December 15, 2021. Authors of accepted paper proposals must submit the complete text of their papers (for a 20-minute presentation) to their session chair or a complete draft of the discussion position (for a 10-minute presentation) to their round table chair by February 15, 2022. Chairs may suggest editorial revisions to a paper or discussion position in order to make it satisfy session or round table guidelines and will return it with comments to the speaker by March 15, 2022. Speakers must complete any revisions and distribute copies of their paper or discussion position to the chair and the other speakers or discussants by April 15, 2022. Chairs reserve the right to withhold a paper or a discussion position from the program if the author has refused to comply with these guidelines. It is the responsibility of the chair(s) to inform speakers of these guidelines, as well as of the general expectations for both a session and participation in this meeting. Each speaker is expected to fund his or her own registration, travel and expenses to Madrid, Spain. All authors had to pay their registration fee to be included in the programme. 

This Call for Papers and Discussion Positions can also be read at the EAHN website - www.eahn.org.

Sessions

S01 – Architectural Criticism: Constructing a History          

S02 – Architectural culture in Charles V’s Empire (1519-1556). From global ambitions to scientific approaches

S03 – Bathroom Matters: Architectures and Infrastructures of the Twentieth Century

S04 – Building from Print: Reconsidering the agency of the building manual

S05 – Countercultural Trends: Contemporary Readings on Late 20th Century Architectural Texts and Works

S06 – Diplomatic Architecture and Changing Power Relations from Imperialism to Post-Colonialism

S07 – Embodied Energy Through Time: Architecture and its Histories of Resource Consumption

S08 – Histories of Informal Architecture

S09 – Learning from Madrid, an open session on Contemporary Urban Peripheries

S10 – Magical Architecture

S11 – Mid-Century Modern Architecture and the Academic Tradition

S12 – Non-Aligned Narratives - South and Eastern European Architectural Criticism during the Cold War

S13 – Poetry Designing Architecture: A Global Exploration of Structures Arising from Poetry

S14 – The Architecture of Global Governance

S15 – The Combinatorial Imperative: Discourses and Practices of Architectural Modularity in the 20th Century

S16 – The compact city inside out. Compact cities throughout the ages

S17 – Untimely Teachers: Recovering Postmodernism's Anachronic Pedagogies

S18 – Urban Design and the Rediscovery of the Historic City

S19 – Women and Radical Bureaucracy

S20 – Women in Architectural Periodicals: Gender Stereotypes, Feminist Discourse and the Female Gaze

Roundtables

RT01 – But today we collect likes: digital mass media, history and new research methodologies.

RT02 - From the South

RT03 - Historiography, get it right!

RT04 - The conditioned ground

RT05 - Toxics / Architectural Histories

S01 – Architectural Criticism: Constructing a History

Chairs: Hélène Jannière, Université Rennes 2; Paolo Scrivano, Politecnico di Milano.

Architectural criticism has hardly developed the same epistemological tools and body of work as art criticism has done since the beginning of the 20th century. If the history of art criticism seems to have given little space to architectural criticism, criticism has often taken centre stage in modern and contemporary architectural discourses. In recent years, recurring discussions about its alleged “crisis” have also hindered most historical analyses on criticism’s founding criteria, on its primary actors and cultural milieus, its theoretical instruments, and its universe of intellectual references. Contrary to the history of art criticism, fully defined as an accepted field of art history in the 1980s, the history of architectural criticism remains in large part to be built. A few works mark out the construction of this field of research, as a reflection not only of different intellectual traditions but also of diverse theoretical postulations. The history of architectural criticism, in fact, still overlaps with multiple research realms: the histories of architectural theories; the histories of critics intended as histories of intellectual and professional trajectories that contributed to establishing the ground for architectural criticism; and the histories of media outlets dedicated to architecture. As related but subsidiary fields, none of them has established sufficient ground for the construction of a specific history of architectural criticism.

This session proposes to chart the current state of the history of architectural criticism by inviting contributions that participate in the consolidation of such a historical subject. Proposals may address three different types of questions.
In the first place, the session is open to contributions that adopt an epistemological or methodological approach to the history of architectural criticism. In the second place, it intends to host communications casting light on particular aspects of architectural criticism’s history, from the beginning of the 19th century to the present, for example, national or regional specificities and narratives or trying to analyze possible intersections with historical or theoretical work. Finally, it wants to encourage the analysis of exemplary cases and themes, such as notable figures of critics, media initiatives, and notions of criticism. Submissions may also examine discourses on criticism developed by architects, journalists, theorists and historians, including those emerging from their own practices of criticism. Studies on criticism as a visual discourse or as a visual tool, taking into account the role that images play in building critical discourses in books or magazines, are particularly welcome.

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S02 – Architectural culture in Charles V’s Empire (1519-1556). From global ambitions to scientific approaches

Chairs: Francesca Mattei, Roma Tre University; Carlos Plaza, Universidad de Sevilla.

In 2022 the 500th anniversary of the return to Sevilla of the explorer Juan Sebastián Elcano after the first circumnavigation of the world offers the opportunity to re-examine some aspects relating to the age of the explorations promoted by Charles V (1500-1558). In 1519 Charles V obtained control over the vastest Empire of human history: from country to country, different cultural traditions coexisted with the new political and economic alliances, made possible by trade routes, and travels of explorers, diplomats, merchants, and artists. Moreover, a rising awareness of a new dimension of the world characterised written political sources, geographical descriptions, literary and diplomatic texts. In his pivotal essay Holding the World in Balance: The Connected Histories of the Iberian Overseas Empires (1500-1640) (2007), Sanjay Subrahmanyam emphasises the existence of fragile balances and synergies in the world dominated by the global ambitions of the Iberian Empires.

This session aims to investigate how both architectural practice and theory mirror the phenomenon of global expansion promoted by Charles V. How is it recognizable the dialogue among different cultures? Which figures and tools allow the mobility of ideas and knowledge through the Empire? To what extent have been changed the scientific and historiographical approaches over time?

This session will host papers focused on monographic case studies (one building, one documents, one written source, one figure) or transversal topic. Objectives of this session are proposing a dialogue between the history of early modern architecture and the rising interest in global history, and analysing methodological problems connected to the wide geographical perspectives and the new critical interpretations.

Suggested topics are:
• Global ambitions and local traditions in the architectural culture across Europe and Iberian America.
• Architectural patronage, architectural curiosity: figures of the global world (explorers, rules, merchants, diplomats, conquerors and men of arms, humanists…).
• Inhabiting in the early modern world: cultures, traditions, meanings.
• Paired strategies: conquest and architectural patronage in Iberian monarchies.
• The control over the Empire: maps and fortifications.
• The memory of the past: monuments for explorers, monuments of explorers (XVI-XX Century).
• Perception of the world, knowledge of history: travel diaries, scientific treatises, antiquarian sources.
• Circulation of architectural models in the early modern world: drawings, buildings, texts.
• Dialogues among religions: churches, mosques, temples.
• Multilingual culture, polyglot research: methodological problem and scientific approaches.
• Historiography of the history of architecture: Charles V's global Empire.

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S03 – Bathroom Matters: Architectures and Infrastructures of the Twentieth Century

Chairs: Ignacio G. Galán, Barnard College; Iván L. Munuera, Princeton University.

Restrooms are sites where environmental, technical, and social concerns have been mediated in different moments in history. This session aims to address those complex and multiscalar negotiations as they particularly manifested in the twentieth century, considering different devices, typologies, and infrastructural deployments proposed in this period; conflicting meanings associated with new spaces and practices; and alternative organizations of bodies and resources enacted in both public and private restrooms. We aim to trace how different architectures put in friction local epistemologies and praxes around the world with western ideals and models expanding along with colonial networks, and how different designs were reinforced or challenged through the transformation of technology, shifting socio-cultural hierarchies, and changing understandings of the environment.

Possible paper topics for this session include the restroom architectures developed by political regimes characteristic of the twentieth century, from totalitarian powers to post-colonial governments; the toilets and sewage infrastructures corresponding to changing conceptualizations of the division between culture and nature, from those pertaining to non-modern contexts to those of environmentalist movements; the architectural enactments of diverse understandings of the body, health, race, gender, and sex imposed by colonial hierarchies and those following the liberation movements in the second half of the century; restroom devices and typologies following technocratic ideas versus those challenging restrictive normativities along with technosocial paradigms; and the deployments of restrooms characterizing diverse territorial models of cohabitation, from the suburbs to the global metropolis.

From the postures regulated by specific devices to the ecosystems transformed by the dumping of sewage, the architecture of bathrooms characteristically links diverse scales and topics together. Rather than aiming to disentangle them, we invite paper proposals to privilege an intersectional perspective, in the understanding of the bathroom as both an embodiment of multiple and compounding values and conflicts, and as a material artefact giving form to eco-social relationships throughout the twentieth century.

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S04 – Building from Print: Reconsidering the agency of the building manual

Chairs: Gregorio Astengo, ETH Zurich / IE University; Emma Letizia Jones, Victoria and Albert Research Institute (VARI) / ETH Zurich.

In 1899 Scottish plasterer William Millar published his building manual Plastering Plain and Decorative. Partly a ‘how-to’ guide for client-builders and craftsmen and partly a history of architecture through the lens of the stucco tradition, Plastering Plain and Decorative has since become one of the most commercially successful architectural publications of all time: now on its 10th edition, its last reprinting was in 2010.

Despite its ubiquity, Millar’s manual belongs to a vast family of publications largely excluded from architectural historiographies, which have instead been established upon other forms of literature - namely the treatise - reflecting the architect’s operation from within a scholarly western tradition. Conversely, the building manual has typically been examined as a derivative abridgement and ‘practical’ aberration of the academically elevated discourse produced by treatises.

This panel challenges this assumption by assembling a varied array of contributions, from a broad historical and geographical range, which reevaluate the significant forms of knowledge produced by building manuals and related ‘how-to’ documents: trade catalogues, pattern books, building guides and periodicals, but also builders’ manuscripts, notebooks and price books. By distinguishing the material and literary qualities, authorship and readership of the manual, this panel reconsiders it as one of the most enduring and impactful forms of architectural literature, offering an alternative history of architecture outside its established canons.

While the treatise’s focus is the legitimation of universal principles, the more technical building manual establishes a direct material connection to the building world. As such, the manual contains primary evidence of how the vast majority of the built environment was supposed to be assembled, providing a ‘foundational’ urban image from the undervalued perspective of its makers, and containing evidence of phenomena such as the standardisation and prefabrication of building elements; the transmogrification of classical ornaments for mass production; the globalisation of building models in processes of colonisation; the systematisation of capitalist modes of speculative building; the intersection of printing and building technologies; and the codification of layered authorships in the production of architecture, including those of unskilled workers, migrants and historically marginalised groups.

We particularly seek contributions that explore the building manual’s role as the carrier of a global architectural discourse, outside the traditions of the treatise. In so doing, our proposed panel aims to situate the social, political and economic agencies of these printed materials, as testimonies of a building culture which is still too absent from our architectural histories.

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S05 – Countercultural Trends: Contemporary Readings on Late 20th Century Architectural Texts and Works

Chairs: Horacio Torrent, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile; Ruth Verde Zein, Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie.

Canonical history of architecture books had established a corpus of highly regarded mainstream authors, buildings and urban experiences, setting their narratives to make them concur with a selected interpretation of the universal ethos of a giving historical moment. Scattered references to other alternative events, when included, are presented as quaint and ephemeral deviations of such freshly established standards. This conventional historiographical approach is under question for its inability to adequately consider multi-layered and complex worldwide panoramas.  To try and foster the possibility of change, it is necessary to properly contemplate the meaningful voids of emptiness that have been obliquely circumscribed by these canonical narratives. 

In the effort to help open up other possibilities, it is important to reconsider a wide range of diverse events that remained forgotten, hidden or subdued. The aim of this session is to contribute to these efforts by giving room to contemporary studies and research on the so-called “countercultural” architectural manifestations of the second half of the 20th century.

A countercultural expression exhibits values, norms and results that substantially differ or are diametrically opposed to the mainstream ones. The word was coined probably in the late 1940s and has been frequently used to label some of the mid-20th century events. We believe its meanings may be suitably extended, as to further explore events belonging to any and every decade of the end of the last millennium.

This session will be looking for original bold new readings on countercultural architectural texts and works belonging to the second half of the 20th century. We will accept articles proposing concerted studies going beyond the important base of collecting and presenting original archival information on less known events. Our aim is to receive studies daringly exploring new interpretations, understandings, analyses, impressions, comprehensions, conceptions and imaginations, preferably favouring alternative and intersectional cultural paths.

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S06 – Diplomatic Architecture and Changing Power Relations from Imperialism to Post-Colonialism 

Session sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians Great Britain.

Chairs: Fredie Floré, KULeuven; Anne-Françoise Morel, KULeuven.

In architectural terms, an embassy is the common word for the built ‘container’ of a permanent diplomatic mission of one country within the borders of another. It consists of a chancery and the ambassador’s residence, sometimes housed in the same building. From a historical point of view, diplomatic buildings are often related to the typology of the office or the hôtel particulier, but also to symbolic structures of (national) representation and power, such as the town hall and palace. This typological hybrid only gradually evolved into specific building commissions. Until the early 20th century, few nation states invested in the construction of new diplomatic buildings as means of self-representation, instead continuing the practice of using existing residential buildings to accommodate their needs. Over the course of the century several countries began to design and build embassies that reflected new architectural concerns and changes in diplomatic approaches. While this evolution of the diplomatic building stock of specific nations has been discussed with a focus on the post WWII period and the West – Jane Loeffler’s Architecture of Diplomacy (1998) being one of the canonical works – scholarship on this subject remains both fragmented and Euro/US- centric.

This session intends to broaden the picture by opening up the chronological and geographical scope of investigation, drawing particular attention to the impact of both the geopolitical processes of imperialism and decolonization on diplomatic relations and architectural cultures. The aim is to discern how these major geopolitical events influenced architectural exchanges between receiving and sending state, as well as between old powers and newly founded nation-states. What kinds of architectural statements have been made by former colonies in the capitals of their former ‘rulers’ and vice versa? How have emerging powers interpreted diplomatic architecture? How did newly founded nation-states in and outside the West conceive their representation through diplomatic buildings and how do changing power relations effect existing building policies? How has architectural culture been complicit in the diplomatic mission? What we can learn about colonialism and imperialism from the architecture of these buildings, and how did their creation and use influenced political developments?

This session takes a broad approach to the chronological scope defined by the geopolitical flux of Imperialism and Post-colonialism, and invites papers that reflect on the architectural nature of the foreign mission, including para-diplomatic premises such as diplomatic missions by commercial entities, as a consciously constructed place facilitating diplomatic encounters, social events, housing and bureaucratic work. It also welcomes proposals that consider the question of definition and typology, and that reflect on the specific methodological challenges of studying such spaces including the interiors, as well as proposals considering how the changing international diplomatic culture impacted diplomatic architecture.

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S07 – Embodied Energy Through Time: Architecture and its Histories of Resource Consumption

Chairs: Barnabas Calder, University of Liverpool; Alex Bremner, University of Edinburgh.

The global Climate Emergency is the most urgent and vital challenge of our time. Yet architectural history has only taken tentative steps in reassessing its responsibility towards this challenge. Relatively little has been done to change fundamentally how we view the historic built environment as an energy intensive, resource-based industry in the context of design, patronage, theory, or any other register via which architecture might be interpreted. Therefore, opportunities are being missed to recalibrate our awareness of the problem through education and scholarship.

This panel invites applicants to consider how the history of buildings/architecture can be better understood as a process of networked material assemblage in which energy inputs are considered a (if not the) key transformative factor. This necessarily touches on the basic ontology of architecture, but can be seen as part of a much wider, known, and understood planning procedure that actors in the design-build process engaged with at every step of the way, from specification, procurement, and processing to transportation, erection, and use. It also includes other supply and service industries that provided sources of energy. Combined, these practices and procedures afford a ready index to the levels of embodied energy that the realisation of ‘architecture’ entails, thus highlighting both its immediate and cumulative impact on the environment.

How, for instance, can we begin to view buildings as enmeshed in local, regional, and global ecologies of extraction and consumption, leading to an awareness not only of architecture’s ‘carbon footprint’, but also what Jane Hutton has called its ‘reciprocal landscapes’ (i.e., the physical transformation and scarring of the earth through extractive industries associated with building, near and far)? In agrarian societies, how does a proper understanding of energy inputs and their resource implications shed new light on energy-hungry materials like glass, metals and fired ceramics? How do changes in the relative prices of labour and heat alter the priorities and preferences of designers and clients? How did the reuse of materials change with the advent of cheap intense heat energy with fossil fuels?

We particularly encourage historic case studies that seek to bridge the gap between assumed and known energy inputs, bringing new data sets to bear as evidence of architecture as an energetic process. Proposals from all periods and places will be considered, and we especially welcome topics which offer new insight and data relating to architecture of the agrarian millennia and industrial periods before 1900.

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S08 – Histories of Informal Architecture

Chairs: Florian Urban, Glasgow School of Art; Kathrin Golda-Pongratz, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya / Universitat Internacional de Catalunya.

Informal buildings constitute a large portion of the urban fabric in most big cities and urban agglomerations and figure prominently in the classic accounts of John Turner, Janice Perlman or John Habraken. They constitute also a major field of research in urban planning, anthropology, urban geography, political economy and sociology, while, at the same time, they have so far led a shadowy existence in the field of architectural history and are at times deliberately excluded from the official urban and architectural history of cities and the related discourse.

We invite papers that take a perspective on informal settlements from an architectural historical point of view, with a focus on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. These include the cities of the Global South, where the differences between formal and informal in the different forms of favela, barriada, zopadpatti or “slum” are often blurry and have significantly changed over the course of the last 150 years. We also invite papers that look at the metropolises of Europe and North America, where informal architecture has attracted less scholarly attention, but where unplanned and unauthorised settlements in some contexts were just as prominent. 

We particularly invite papers that take a critical stance on informality and its evolution. These can be papers that historicise, contextualise or question the idea of “informal architecture” and its intellectual underpinnings against the background of the architectural discourse.

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S09 – Learning from Madrid, an open session on Contemporary Urban Peripheries

Chairs: Alona Martinez Perez, De Montfort University; Ana Miret Garcia, University of Edinburgh.

We live in an era of massive and rapid urbanization. Around the world, the spatial peripheries of cities have expanded dramatically during the first two decades of the XXI century. The majority of people worldwide live and work in urban environments, most of which lie beyond the boundaries of the existing traditional city. Nonetheless the peripheries of cities remain an under-researched field.

Urban peripheries have been often understood in antithesis to central city cores and characterised by uneven socio-spatial and economic distribution. According to Keil (2020), contemporary forms of urban growth are diversifying in morphology, socioeconomic and demographic profile, and boundaries between cities and their peripheries are increasingly breaking down.

Whereas some of the defining qualities of contemporary urban peripheries are dependency, dispersion, fragmentation, insularity, isolation, poor connections and access to infrastructures and facilities, in some places the tendency of post-suburbanization is subverting the classical de-densification associated to suburbanization into a process that involves densification, complexification and diversification (Charmes & Keil 2015)
The understanding of the European periphery from a critical stance is key nowadays, particularly in Madrid, a city that has seen unprecedented urban growth within the last 20 years. Through the PAU’s (Urban Action Plans) Madrid’s periphery has become the biggest urban construction site in Europe, where a piece of land bigger than the whole size of the city built up to 1960 and including all the available land not environmentally protected, has been urbanised. As Stefano Boeri writes: “Today 60% of the European urban population lives outside the limits of the city that was built and consolidated by the end of the second-half of the last century”.

As the EAHN conference is based in Madrid, the city offers the perfect place to discuss critically the urban implications of neoliberal models of city’s developments in Europe which include places where most of us now live or work in. This session is led by Alona Martinez Perez and Ana Miret Garcia, who have got a wide body of both research and practice work about Madrid. We welcome papers that explore new and interdisciplinary theoretical and methodological approaches to better capture the dynamics and characteristics of contemporary urban peripheries including forms of governance, policy, planning and/or the lived experience of everyday life in the urban periphery from a critical point of view.

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S10 – Magical Architecture

Chairs: Thomas Mical.

This session seeks interesting and unusual research proposals that reveal multifarious aspects of the supernatural, magical, and re-enchantment in the history of architecture and interiors, perhaps to challenge the culture of efficiency with micro-histories of wonder. Contributors are invited to contribute to a suite of case studies investigating the desire and the presence of the magical in 19thC and 20thC architecture and interiors.
The work of architectural history cannot be exclusively materialist, and there have been strong traditions of historical thinking that accommodate the magical as cultural influence and process (Eliade, Warburg, Gell). Theories of the modern have surreptitious references from theosophy to Hegelian geist, situating the spaces of the magical is the tangency of the natural and the supernatural worlds. We can expand the understanding of magical spaces to cover a range of practices: from supernatural carnival event-spaces to hidden esoteric and occult spaces in the city. We can also locate in history and cartography the role of the architectural structure to perform as portal, but we can also locate in history the propositional magical genesis of new worlds and impossible gardens of unearthly delight.
To the question of the potentiality and after-image of magical practices and worldviews, we seek clear explorations of the theories of the magical arising from the prior historical convergences of the magical as generator or manifestation of esoteric geometries, schemas, or cosmologies. For the investigation of magical architecture, we seek a more robust and diversified array of propositions and proposals that ascertain the multifarious meanings of the magical. In seeking a wide tableaux of cases, we ascertain multiple lines of inquiry: the magical as the staging of the performative transformation in charged spaces; the magical as enchantment and re-enchantment in the generic world; the documents and rituals for conjuring and summoning forms of the esoteric in places of everyday lived spaces; the distinct presence of spaces designed for or haunted by animate objects, wonderous machines, and uncanny media; and the precise analysis of the perceived convergence of magic and technology (technics, technicity) in architectural history.
We welcome case studies of individual projects or categories of projects where the magical, the wonderous, or the supernatural have found purchase, and where the manifestations of the magical are still lingering. We welcome case studies using conventional and unconventional forms of evidence, developed with a disciplined eye and critical mentality.

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S11 – Mid-Century Modern Architecture and the Academic Tradition

Chairs: Carlos Eduardo Comas, Universidade Federal Rio Grande do Sul; Maria Cristina Cabral, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

Detractors and admirers alike have stressed both modern architecture's link with Bauhaus teachings and its break with the academic tradition fostered by the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. They ignore that long ago (1960) the British historian Reyner Banham (1922-1988) convincingly presented the academic tradition as a predisposing cause of modern architecture, and they probably do not know that much earlier (1934), privileging the close reading of the Corbusian oeuvre over the Corbusian polemics, Brazilian architect Lucio Costa (1902- 1998) condemned eclectic historicism but presented modern architecture as heir to the inclusiveness of the academic tradition, which promoted the classic as well as the classical spirit. As a matter of fact, most modern architects born between 1900 and 1930 had academic training owing most of its energy and authority to the Parisian Beaux-Arts, yet the correlation between such a worldwide system of instruction and the work of those architects has usually been overlooked.

Taking our cue from those sources and many others, such as the studies on Le Corbusier by British critics Colin Rowe and Alan Colquhoun starting in the immediate postwar, the 1970s research on the Beaux-Arts system in the nineteenth century by Americans David van Zanten and Neil Levine, the Brazilian scholarship on the Rio-based school of modern architecture growing since the 1980s, or the more recent revision of the Beaux-Arts system in the twentieth-century by Frenchmen Jacques Lucan and Philippe Panerai, we look forward to papers illuminating that overlooked correlation through the individual or comparative analysis of works by specific architects or groups of architects in specific regions or countries, with special attention to strategies of composition and characterization, the choreography of movement and structural and material choices. Focussing on the persistence and change of design elements and principles, our session wants to reopen the discussion on the nature and limits of disciplinary autonomy, as well as on the growth of a modern tradition and its discontents.

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S12 – Non-Aligned Narratives - South and Eastern European Architectural Criticism during the Cold War

Chairs: Rute Figueiredo, Universidade Autonoma de  Lisboa, ESAP; Jasna Galjer, University of Zagreb.

Over the last few years, historiography has been increasingly engaged in a jeux d’échelles, as Jürgen Osterhammel (2006) pointed out, in which the global is detected in the local and “local specificity is placed within ever-increasing concentric contexts stretching towards globality”. This tendency is also perceptible in the historiography of architecture, where transnational approaches have uncovered new perspectives on the circulation of architects, models, and images, calling into question the well-established East vs West geopolitical dichotomy during the Cold War. As recent studies remind us (Moravánzsky 2017), the Cold War brought other geographical and conceptual interactions that were previously neglected by Western-based historiography of architecture. However, the global system of communication and network of agents that allowed the construction of non-aligned narratives between the South and Eastern European geographies still needs to be analysed.
This session wants to draw a comprehensive picture on South and Eastern European architectural criticism exchanges during the Cold War. The term non-aligned, borrowed from the geopolitical field, is here used in a broader sense to refer a conceptual and geographical framework that encompasses other narratives, discourses, debates and stories in architectural criticism which usually are not embraced into the “canonical” narratives. Non-alignment also alludes to the notion of a bridge between those European areas and non-Western geographies, namely South America.
This session invites contributions centred on non-aligned narratives and on the constellations of actors as well as places (formal and informal) of encounter and debate. It wants to inquire on the “situatedness” of architectural criticism as a platform of exchange and transfer of ideas, ideologies and knowledge. We are interested in proposals using comparative and critical analysis, namely studies focusing primarily on practices of dialogue, debate and cultural translation. We also welcome proposals that explore the network of "media-driven” agents: periodicals, exhibitions and other forms of communication in the public sphere (such as radio and television, performance, installation), bringing into the spotlight the process of constructing the new in-between political and disciplinary narratives in the field of architectural criticism.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Architectural criticism as a tool of the cultural, political, social, spatial, performative practice of cultural translation;
- Mediating architectural discourse through experimental models of communication, particularly in the public sphere;
- The impact of architectural criticism in the process of societal democratisation and modernisation.

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S13 – Poetry Designing Architecture: A Global Exploration of Structures Arising from Poetry

Chair: Adedoyin Teriba, Vassar College.

Over the centuries, plenty of ink has been spilt chronicling the ways in which poets have responded to, and been inspired by architecture and landscapes. The result has been the creation of poems that grope towards experiencing places and reflecting on those encounters through words. Other ways of “writing” poetry about architecture have arisen without the use of ink; specifically, oral poetry. Yet, the purpose of this proposed session will be to explore the reverse from the vantage point of a global perspective namely: how have architecture and gardens - in different places and eras - arisen from poetry? Or more succinctly, how have poets imagined and created architecture or landscapes, using poetry as their starting point?

One may recall that the Englishman Alexander Pope embodied poetry and place-making in a single individual. He penned poems such as the one to Richard Boyle, the Earl of Burlington entitled “Epistle IV,” where he praises the Stowe House (which Pope visited from the 1720s onwards). (The “Epistle” was composed between 1731 and 1735). Pope’s creation of neo-classical gardens echoed his approach to poetry – in the latter he read classical poets and imitated their style when creating his poetry.

Yet in the hands of a more recent figure, a 20th-century Southwest Nigerian king, poetry does become the starting point for the construction of a palace that had previously been destroyed. Solomon Babayemi (1927-1997) was a scholar as well as a monarch who researched oral poetry known as Oriki Orile - oral histories of different palaces in Southwest Nigeria – a tradition that is at least 300 years old. Babayemi used the oral poetry of his own palace to reconstruct the structure after it had been destroyed a century earlier. It may be better however to note that Babayemi’s “reconstructed” palace did not resemble the original one; the second edifice had architectural elements one would associate with the Renaissance and the International Style. Babayemi’s recourse to poetry created an architecture that was a response to his present time.

My hope and plan, if this proposal is chosen, would be to invite different paper proposals that explore similar instances around the world and in different eras of how poetry – oral or written - became the basis for creating architecture.

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S14 – The Architecture of Global Governance

Chairs: Sven Sterken, KU Leuven; Dennis Pohl, TU Delft / Karlsruhe Institute of Technology.

During the past century, states have increasingly become subordinate to intergovernmental organizations. Initially, the seats of such bodies, like the Permanent Court of Arbitration (The Hague), the League of Nations (Geneva), and the UN (New York) gave rise to high architectural aspirations. Values such as peace, cooperation and solidarity were intended to foster a new architectural idiom expressing political power beyond the established registers of nationalism, democracy, and separation of powers. Today, institutions such as NATO, WTO, and IMF constitute a global governance that relies on non-hierarchical steering mechanisms. Being non-elected bodies for the most part, these organizations exist in the public imagination predominantly as abstract acronyms, and are generally housed in corporate-like buildings. With bigness and harmless banality as their principal characteristics, these buildings corroborate the popular idea that global governance requires gigantic bureaucratic machines that are of little architectural interest. The recent inauguration of the vast NATO headquarters in Brussels was a painfully illustration of this, for it went unnoticed in the architectural press. Thus, the architecture of global governance not only constitutes a political problem, it also is a design issue that challenges both architectural criticism and historiography. 

Starting with the assumption that these transnational political constructs require new and imaginative forms of identification, this session proposes to interrogate the capacity of architecture to provide spaces for representing such bodies at the global scale, thereby shaping political culture by defining procedures, rituals, and norms of governance. To this end, we invite papers that discuss built, unrealized, or theoretical projects for the seats of supranational or intergovernmental organizations across continents. Papers may focus, for example, on how political values are visually expressed through built form; address such buildings as theatres of diplomacy and explore how they accommodate the rituals of consultation, lobbying, and decision making. Or, papers may investigate how their complex bureaucratic machinery is organized in terms of offices, translation boots, and meeting rooms. We would especially welcome contributions that consider non-Western international organizations (such as the Non-Aligned Movement and All-African Peoples Conference), as well as papers analyzing how the interfaces between bureaucratic acts, political leaders, and the public are shaped and exploited. For paradoxically, these buildings – despite being symbols and instruments of global governance – are mostly sealed off from the world they represent.

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S15 – The Combinatorial Imperative: Discourses and Practices of Architectural Modularity in the 20th Century

Chairs: Jennifer Mack, KTH Royal Institute of Technology; Pablo Miranda Carranza, MIT.

During the postwar period, standardization streamlined architecture for new modern societies, emphasizing both universal citizens and “value-neutral” norms. This positivist approach generated mass housing, town centres, and interchangeable building components. New pursuits and organizations – from Clarence Perry’s neighbourhood unit to the International Standard Organisation (ISO) – transformed the architect’s role and toolbox, consolidating design into modular kits of parts to be assembled in numerous (but limited) ways that neatly dovetailed with the aims of rising welfare states across Europe and in the United States.

From the late 1960s, such “objective” norms gave way to critiques, as knowledge became “situated” (Haraway) and theories of “counterpublics” (Fraser) questioned universalism itself. In the wake of these debates, new discourses and practices of architectural modularity emerged. Advents such as postmodernist formalism, “pattern languages,” and “shape grammars” fashioned fresh symbolic vocabularies and technocratic approaches that their makers assumed would address divergent social demands and reposition architecture as a professional practise imbued with meaning. Curiously, these vocabularies of modules, architectural elements, trees, networks, and types still produced only certain kinds of sentences. This architecture could not escape the problematics of linguistics: of meaning and interpretation, of the limits of representation, and of the politics ordering who “can speak” (Spivak). Architectural modules and symbols remained representative of normative thinking.

This session examines evolving discourses and practices of this “combinatorial imperative” in architecture during the 20th century. Emphasizing histories and theories of modular systems, the session eschews the oeuvres of architectural virtuosos in favour of those of lesser-known architects, collectives in municipal planning offices, or technicians who were ostensibly non-architects. Papers might study the sphere of “bread and butter” architecture, the mundane within a discipline that prides itself on exceptionalism, or everyday practices through which modularity is encouraged or disputed. We invite studies of modularity across diverse global contexts during the 20th century. Papers could investigate questions such as the following: How has modularity transformed buildings, cities, construction, and architectural design? How have discourses of the universal and particular met, and what have been the ethical and aesthetic consequences of systems of modularity? What do questions of authorship and autonomy signify in contexts where architectural design has been translated into a “rational” system of parts, to be combined? How have the same standards and modules been treated differently across divergent geographic and political contexts?

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S16 – The compact city inside out. Compact cities throughout the ages

Chairs: Petra Brouwer, University of Amsterdam; Tim Verlaan, University of Amsterdam.

From the 1970s onwards, the compact city has been the leading planning concept in Western urbanism. In response to the massive suburbanization and comprehensive redevelopment schemes of the post-war era, policymakers, community action groups, social scientists, architects and urban planners embraced the idea of the compact city as a means to regenerate the central city and reinvigorate urbanism as a way of life. 

Denouncing suburbia and urban sprawl, the advocates of the compact city, ranging from Jane Jacobs to Edward Glaeser, stress the benefits of urban life and promote a cautious, piecemeal approach to urban renewal. More recently, the growing concerns over climate change and the living environment have only reinforced the reputation of the compact city as a sustainable alternative to car-centred, resource-gobbling suburbs. However, critics have also pointed at the planning concept’s dilemmas, such as the loss of green space in central areas, the deterioration of living quality due to overpopulation, and the neglect of housing preferences of people not wanting to live in dense urban environments.

This session seeks to re-contextualise and historicize the compact city by proposing a broader and more inclusive framework than the narrative that became dominant in Western planning practices since the 1970s. In order to develop new ideas on the compact city, we seek papers that give insight into 1) the historicity and/or 2) the worldwide interest in the compact city as a planning concept. We are curious if the compact city was already a concept in pre-industrial times, if we can define the geographical, cultural and historical specificities of compact cities, and how specific ideas and practices circulated across time and space. We invite papers on case studies that address the following questions: How did policymakers and planners reflect on compact cities? What kind of terminology did they use? For what reasons did they opt for a compact city? Which planning strategies and tools were invented and employed? Here one can think of protecting the surrounding countryside, the demarcation of city borders, and reconstruction projects. How did policymakers and planners reflect on the dilemma’s and downsides of the compact city? We invite papers on case studies from all historical periods and geographical places.

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S17 – Untimely Teachers: Recovering Postmodernism's Anachronic Pedagogies

Chairs:Wouter Van Acker, Université Libre de Bruxelles; Steven Lauritano, Leiden University.

During the late 1950s and 1970s, when a re-examination of history unfolded against the backdrop of growing student protest in architecture schools, different architects and historians reread the work of major architects of the past, thereby staking out a position in a growing controversy over how architects should learn from history (Wright and Parks 1990). Whether out of sympathy with dissatisfied pupils, or as a counter reaction, several educators looked past the masters of modernism (i.e. their own teachers) in search of new, untimely mentors -  those who might offer lessons ‘controversial and alive as ever’ that transcend ‘temporal conditions’ (Ungers 1981, 118). This panel aims to explore the pedagogical consequences of this turn to archaic teachers.

How were such untimely lessons assimilated through experimental historicist or operative pedagogies in architecture schools? Oswald Mathias Ungers’s seminar teaching was directly informed by the architecture of Karl Friedrich Schinkel; Bruno Zevi asked students to design ‘critical models’ of Michelangelo’s architecture for the 1964 exhibition co-curated with Paolo Portoghesi; and Colin Rowe developed a pedagogy founded on a Gestalt-psychological rereading of the villas of Andrea Palladio (to cite but three instances of pedagogical reenactments, which like all survivals, reveal more about the concerns of the reenactors than of the reenacted).

Recent research projects on architectural pedagogies in the postwar years (Anderson 1999; Ockman 2012; Colomina 2015) contain multiple leads as to how the postmodern concept of ‘history as a teacher’ entered architecture schools, parallel to new formalist, activist and environmental approaches. Little research, however, is available that documents the teaching of history in close proximity to studio programs, a space of exchange that triggered intense debates about historicist form-making and non-figurative ways of integrating history in design.

This session invites contributions that investigate anachronic pedagogical experiments in the period described above, the untimeliness of which is less concerned with the shock of the old as provoked by the 1975 MoMA exhibition ‘The Architecture of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts’, and more with imaginary didactic dialogues staged around the work of outmoded masters. It proposes to understand these encounters through a sense of contemporariness, which as Agamben defined it, is ‘that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism’ (Agamben 2009, 41). We invite papers that examine unforeseen ways of reading antiquated masters and of ‘interpolating time’, and as such, challenging the classical theorizations of postmodern time consciousness.

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S18 – Urban Design and the Rediscovery of the Historic City

Chairs: Janina Gosseye, TUDelft; Isabelle Doucet, Chalmers University of Technology.

From the late 1960s the city once again became an important preoccupation for architects, both as a formal entity and a site for social and political struggle. Informed by the writings of Jane Jacobs, the theorisation of the urban struggles in sociology, and a growing belief in the need for a typological and aesthetic reappropriation of the historic city, architects increasingly acted as urban designers. At that time, the field of urban design had only recently been given its own nomenclature; in 1956, to be precise, at a conference convened at Harvard University (US). Participants to this conference, including Garrett Eckbo, Jane Jacobs, Victor Gruen, Lewis Mumford and José Luis Sert, concurred that the intellectual split between architectural design and urban planning was not helpful to city building, and that a new discipline was needed, which was committed to improving urban ways of life. Over the following decades, urban design was gradually adopted in university education worldwide and became firmly established as a profession. Taking place in parallel with the rediscovery of pre-modernist urban forms, many contemporary urban design schemes embraced the historic city as an aesthetic and political model.

This session seeks to explore the entanglements that occurred between the growing appreciation for neo-traditional norms and forms, and the formalisation of urban design as a discipline. We invite papers that investigate the different ways in which the educational institutionalization of urban design – through the establishment of urban design courses and programs – was influenced by the growing belief in the need for a typological and aesthetic reappropriation of the historic city, and also how this played out in projects designed and/or realised from the early 1970s through to the early 1990s by (self-proclaimed) urban designers. We invite papers that examine these developments, both within and beyond the proclaimed ‘centres’ (Europe and North America), and that pay close attention to the way in which designers and projects positioned themselves between architecture and urban planning on the one hand, and modernism and traditionalism on the other.

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S19 – Women and Radical Bureaucracy

Chairs: Helena Mattsson, KTH, Royal Institute of Technology.

Today, vigorous efforts are being made to rewrite the canon of architectural historiography from perspectives that were earlier neglected (i.e. gender, race, post/colonialism, intersectionality). Approaching historical evidence such as archives, regulations, objects, or drawings from these often-forgotten angles not only begins to restructure the historical narrative but also reconfigures conceptions of the discipline itself. This panel draws further on this work by examining women's role in the realm of architectural bureaucracy. The narrow discipline of architecture gave little place for women’s interventions and feminist practices; instead, bureaucracy became a site of feminist struggles, for example in relation to building codes, regulations of care facilities and common spaces, subsidies and policy documents.

Bureaucracy has often been understood in opposition to aesthetic sensibilities, emotions, and fantasies, in line with a popular understanding of Weber’s “rational institution.” Many scholars have, however, examined expressions of the “irrationality of rationality” (Ritzer) and have pointed out the complex structures of bureaucracy, such as the “demons of paperwork” (Kafka) and the “secret joy of bureaucracy” (Graeber). Bureaucrats are not only executing political decisions in front of the “bureau,” they are also making politics (Lipsky). In resonance with these notions the panel explores a radical bureaucracy in the discipline of architecture; a field of experimentation, speculation, imagination, and fantasy that has been crucial for feminist activism.

This panel has two main foci: first, to trace women’s activism within bureaucratic practices of architecture; and second, to examine how women’s practices turned bureaucracy into a radical field of experimentation and thereby expanded the discipline of architecture. Understanding bureaucracy as a site of tension and restructuring, where politics, economics, space, and aesthetics come together, the panel examines the practice of bureaucracy as a “soft field” – a system and a project in continuous flux. The panel invites papers examining the practices of women within architectural bureaucracy, in the state apparatus as well as the private sector, and welcomes papers that take a longer historical perspective: What bureaucratic techniques were used? In what spatial and aesthetic articulations did the bureaucratic practices result? What feminist struggles took place within the administration? Situated studies that explores original archives (digital media, protocols, and other forms of bureaucratic documentation) and use experimental methods such as oral history, witness seminars or other performative techniques are encouraged. Empirical case studies as well as innovative theoretical implications are encouraged.

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S20 – Women in Architectural Periodicals: Gender Stereotypes, Feminist Discourse and the Female Gaze

Chairs: Lucía C. Pérez-Moreno, Universidad de Zaragoza; Stephen Parnell, Newcastle University.

There has been much interest recently in the role of architectural periodicals (newspapers, magazines, journals) in the formation of architecture. Scholars such as Andrew Higgott, Beatriz Colomina, and Kester Rattenbury have argued that architectural media defines architecture, suggesting that architectural periodicals should not only be considered as documents that represent architecture, but have the power to generate spaces of architectural production and be considered as works of architecture in their own right.
Nevertheless, as feminist thinking has shown, any editing, framing, and presentation is never neutral, but culturally constructed. The various agents that participated in architectural periodicals were mainly based on different kinds of networks —personal and professional relations between architects, photographers, critics, etc.— that were predominantly masculine. As such, architectural periodicals were part of a patriarchal structure. Some women, however, had notable responsibilities in architectural periodicals with scopes as diverse as Monica Pidgeon in the British Architectural Design (1941-1975) and Beatriz Colomina in the Spanish Carrer de la Citá (1977-1980).

This session aims to explore women in architectural periodicals working under these patriarchal structures. We are therefore looking for texts reflecting on the following issues:

The gaze of women in architectural periodicals: both women in traditionally masculine positions of power and decision making, and women contributors. Was their editing and framing different? Did they create new spaces to publish other women architects’ works? How different were their editorial practices and critique to those of male editors? And how different were the resulting periodicals and architectures?

We welcome critical re-readings of feminist discourses. What was the relationship between periodicals and feminist discourses on the built environment? How can a feminist reading of architectural periodicals reframe the social construction of architecture, and its history?

Women appear in architectural periodicals in two ways: as architects (subject), and in advertisements (object). Women working for periodicals had to live with images that made sexist use of their image, creating gender stereotypes. How could these coexist? How do architectural periodicals understand women as both subject and object?

This session is interested in papers concerning the European context in the twenty century, although not exclusively. Cases from the nineteenth century and from areas far from the dominant focus of architectural discussion in Western, Central European and Anglo-Saxon periodicals are more than welcome.

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Roundtables

RT01 – But today we collect likes: digital mass media, history and new research methodologies

Chair: Daniel Díez Martínez, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.

In 1956 Alison and Peter Smithson published “But today we collect ads”, a provocative article in which they stated that “as far as architecture is concerned, the influence on mass standards and mass aspirations of advertising is now infinitely stronger than the pace-setting of avant-garde architects, and it is taking over the functions of social reformers and politicians”. More than sixty years later, the information technology revolution has shown that their forecast could not be more accurate. The Internet, especially through social media, has democratized access to architectural content to an audience that, in turn, actively participates in the online processes that shape interest in architecture, highlighting a recent trend or reliving one from the past. Issues that were previously only defined by a few prestigious publishers or small groups of experts within academia are now increasingly subject to the criteria of millions of users connected to a unique and international network.

This session aims to deepen the understanding of architectural research by focusing on the impact of 21st century digital mass media from two perspectives: on the one hand, to interpret society’s understanding of certain moments in the history of architecture based on how they are portrayed by mass media, which in turn fuels a crucial debate for architectural publishing to remain critical; on the other hand, to learn how to use these media as a documentary source in order to write the new history of architecture of the future and reinterpret the history of the past from a contemporary point of view.

The goal is to create a forum in which participants can present and discuss innovative methodologies regarding the use of digital mass media as useful and rigorous architectural history research material. Furthermore, this session welcomes papers that provide answers to specific questions such as:

Are digital mass media having an impact on how the history of architecture is made and understood? Are they a force that modifies trends in today’s architecture? Will considering the popular taste of broader audiences imply a less dogmatic and more democratic history of architecture? What implications does the emergence of these new media have for criticism (not journalism) and the history of architecture? As historians, how can we use these media in our field even when they are new and lack historical weight?

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RT02 – From the South

Chair: Ana María León, University of Michigan.

Current efforts towards more inclusion and diversity in architectural history have turned to the south in order to counter the discipline’s Eurocentric traditions. These efforts often ignore local inequalities and replicate or even augment local privilege. Thus we see architects and scholars from the south featured in US and European platforms, paradoxically celebrating this exacerbation of their privilege as inclusion. Geographical coverage can be used to elide more complicated exclusions based on race, gender, body ability, class, and the ongoing effects of colonialism. On the other hand, academics from the south with access to US and European forums often feel compelled to demonstrate architectural excellence. In doing so, they avoid problematizing its production or focusing on other architectures, particularly if they might exacerbate racialized perceptions of lack.

This round-table is interested in the tensions, challenges, and opportunities of architectural historiography from the south, understood as a conceptual and political position, and the role of the historian in researching, writing, and teaching these narratives. The discourse of Modernity/Coloniality theorists in Latin America has been opposed by Indigenous scholars such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, who have underlined the race and class privilege held by many of these scholars. Franz Fanon has theorized on the role of the “native intellectual,” a scholar that accesses Western education and then is called upon to replicate its methods and biases upon their return. More recently, philosopher Olúfémi O. Táíwò has theorized on the tergiversation of the term “identity politics” and the concept of “elite capture” to argue for more a nuanced understanding of political solidarity. These tensions are present in the absence of Indigenous architecture from modern histories, in the reduction of feminism to the inclusion of privileged white women to the canon, and in the confused understanding of what constitutes whiteness in Latin America and its architectures. This round table will discuss how these tensions are manifested in architectural scholarship, historiography, and pedagogy. It aims to include critical case studies, theoretical reflections, and pedagogical approaches related to the role of architecture in the processes of capital and labour, and in the production of race, gender, and other forms of privilege and otherness within territories traditionally othered. How do these considerations affect the methods of architectural history? How is the academic to maneuver and position themselves in regions under struggle? And, what are the opportunities in producing architectural histories from the South?

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RT03 – Historiography, get it right!

Roundtable sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand.

Chairs: Macarena de la Vega, University of Melbourne; Gevork Hartoonian, University of Canberra.

… experience of the mole of History burrowing through a lengthy past and creating its specific traditions in the process.                    
E. P. Thompson

Yes, histories of architecture do produce traditions: the styles associated with certain periods, the connections made between tendencies and a certain group of architects. Above all, the conjectures which historians have construed and constructed in the delusion that they can capture the Zeitgeist. Nevertheless, should this ever-growing body of work be taken for History? To what extent does a text on the past approximate History? More specifically, what is the intersection between History and histories of architecture? Not every work concerned with past architecture is categorically historical, especially those written in the last twenty years. With the contemporary demise of Theory at least in architectural praxis, the decline of which was foreshadowed by the death of Jacques Derrida, useful binaries such as history and theory, history and criticism have lost their visibility, smoothing the way for the prevailing textuality. This turn of events is coterminous with the dissemination of contemporary digital networks engineered by global capitalism. Rather than to claim “the death of history,” the question is in what capacity does architectural history index History beyond contingencies, without reducing the text to only empirical realities, including those collected through archival research.

To go beyond “reportage” and “textuality,” the two unconscious dimensions of contemporary history writing, we should recall the past accurately. Manfredo Tafuri, for one, said it all: there is no criticism but history. We argue that there is no history but historical criticism. In this sense, the non-contemporaneity implied in the dialectics of past and present plays a crucial role to the point that, like a detective, the historian should seek clues lost in between fragments of collected facts, subjective and objective. To follow E.P. Thompson, to be critically effective, the historiography of architecture should organise and interpret facts and ideas taking into account the specific traditions established by the mole of History. We invite papers that respond to the provocations framed above and that investigate critical strategies in architectural historiography with a focus on one of these topics: heritage and the past present, monumentality and the past frozen, landscape and the everlasting, historical time and temporality, and contemporaneity of architecture and history.

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RT04 – The conditioned ground

Chair:  André Bideau, Accademia di architettura Mendrisio / ETH Zurich.

Architectural historiography and criticism usually assess the relationship between a building and its site. But what if a site is itself a highly engineered and ‘authored’ space? Recent scholarship has addressed the interplay of material practices and spatial production, parsing the logic of capital, and, wherever possible, incorporating postcolonial perspectives. It now appears timely to redirect the narrative to the production of urban environments in advanced capitalism and to a product that is, quite literally, ‘overlooked’ in cities: the conditioned ground.

The urban footprint of a project is often entangled with transactional and legal issues ranging from a protracted site assembly process, financial gambits to preservation policies. Frankfurt’s Neue Altstadt (2018), housed in the envelope of curated facades on a reimagined medieval street pattern, or comprehensive mixed use developments such as Manhattan’s Hudson Yards (2019) and Europaallee at Zurich’s main station (2021) are recent examples of urban undertakings characterized by their highly synthetic character, vast scale and ostentatious visual narrative. All three cases adopt a contextualist posture and draw from localized themes: in Frankfurt a loose interpretation of the historic environment, in New York and Zurich a deployment of real estate as fractured picturesque of metropolitan density. Examining such urban-architectural artefacts is usually premised on their formal or structural properties, such as style, type, materialization, spatial organization and program. Rarely does the discussion include cycles of development, issues of regulation, redundancy and obsolescence. Yet within a deeper organizational logic the interplay of architectural concepts, building practices and materials represents only one layer – warranting a methodology that examines the joint impact on a given site through capital, policy and projected imaginary.

Using the ‘conditioned’ ground as a perspective, this roundtable session will discuss the intersection of visible products with opaque policies, practices and, possibly, forms of resilience and resistance. As propositions, case studies that are linked to the urbanization process are welcome. Contributions to the roundtable may address contemporary interventions as well as examples from recent history straddling urban renewal practices between late Modernism and Postmodernism. Papers should highlight the multi-faceted negotiation of institutions, agencies and designers with physical territories. The session seeks to mix research from the fields of architecture history and theory, urban studies, urban sociology and disciplines addressing governance and real estate – yielding insights into how ground is itself produced.

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RT05 – Toxics / Architectural Histories

Chairs: Meredith TenHoor, Pratt Institute; Jessica Varner, MIT.

We would like to use time at the EAHN meeting to stage a reflective conversation about the architectural histories of deleterious industrial building materials, and, more broadly, about methods for writing material and environmental histories of architecture. This fall, we used the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative’s web platform to solicit articles for a publication on this topic. (See http://we-aggregate.org/piece/toxics). Some articles will be published by the time of the next EAHN meeting and others will be in progress. This roundtable will include the perspectives of contributors to this project, as well as colleagues who may not have been able to contribute to the Aggregate publication. 

As we wrote in our call for papers for the Aggregate Toxics publication, increasingly industrialized building practices have created both new products and new modes of consumption, production, regulation, and disposal. Over the last one hundred years, building materials have also become increasingly composite—made by cutting, mixing, extrusion, cross-lamination, and even nanomaterial microscopic manipulation. Writing histories of buildings and landscapes affected by and made from these materials offers an opportunity to understand how the differences between nature and artifice, production and consumption, business-as-usual and environmental justice, and the toxic and nontoxic are produced and perpetuated through architecture.

Participants in the roundtable would present research case studies as well as address methodological, historical and epistemological questions related to the practice of writing architectural and environmental histories through the lens of toxics. Questions addressed could include: How should we narrate histories of materials that often evade our consciousness, governance, and control? How do we understand the corporeal, environmental, legal, and social responsibilities architects assume or reject under these evolving material conditions? How have we addressed the methodological and practical challenges of writing about untraceable substances, mapping inaccessible supply chains, or navigating legal restrictions on material archives? What do architectural histories of toxics look like, and how can they address structural inequalities that have shaped many environmental histories of building in Europe and beyond?

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Call for Sessions and Round Tables

Despite the fact that the Sixth Biannual Conference of the European Architectural History Network, to be held in Edinburgh, was forced to be postponed from 2020 to 2021 due to the COVID-19 crisis, the network intends to regain its usual rhythm of holding conferences in even years, so it is already organising a Seventh pan-European meeting in Madrid for 2022. In accordance with the EAHN mission statement, this meeting aims to increase the visibility of the discipline; to foster transnational, interdisciplinary and multicultural approaches to the study of the built environment; and to facilitate the exchange of research results in the field. Though the scope of the meeting is European, members of the larger scholarly community are invited to submit proposals related not only to Europe’s geographical framework, but also to its transcontinental aspects.

The main purpose of the meeting is to map the general state of research in disciplines related to the built environment, to promote discussion of current themes and concerns, and to foster new directions for research in the field. Session proposals are intended to cover different periods in the history of architecture and different approaches to the built environment, including landscape and urban history. Parallel sessions will consist of either five papers or four papers and a respondent, with time for dialogue and questions at the end. In addition, a limited number of round-table debates addressing burning issues in the field will also take place at the meeting. Proposals are sought for round-table debates that re-map, re-define, and outline the current discipline. They will typically consist of a discussion between panel members and encourage debate with the audience. The goal is to create a forum in which different scholars can present and discuss their ideas, research materials and methodologies. 

Practical information

The call is to be held in two stages:

First stage:

Scholars who wish to chair a session or a roundtable at EAHN 2022 in Madrid are invited to submit proposals by December 30^th, 2020 using the online platform: https://eventos.upm.es/53558/upload/eahn-seventh-international-meeting.html