Organised and hosted by Marina Lathouri

Series: HCT / PhD Debates
Date: 17/3/2017
Time: 14:00
Venue: 37 FFF

HCT/PHD Debates

The HCT Debates provide a venue for exchange of ideas and arguments. External speakers are invited every week to present and engage with tutors and students. The aim is to position the multiple voices making possible a process of thinking in common, by definition a pedagogical practice different from the seminar or the lecture. The sessions are open to the public.

1960s: ‘Avant-Garde’ Roots, Function. A Terminological Approach

From the early twentieth century the avant-garde forms an important cultural and interdisciplinary sub-system with a strong impact on architecture. However, it is only in the sixties that the term ‘avant-garde’ starts describing architects, groups, and material and immaterial productions of the latter – associated, but also not, with the wide cultural avant-garde circles of their time. The sixties mark the period when the term enters into architectural history books and writings of theory and criticism. A disciplinary consciousness of the avant-garde is now manifest along with avant-garde’s appropriation as endogenous architectural quality. A terminological approach to the avant-garde of the sixties provides tools for detecting patterns of formation and ideological constructions, and for uncovering how these may even shape avant-garde’s understanding up to the present.

Texts

1.Bürger, Peter, Theorie der Avantgarde (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974) English translation: Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Manchester; Minneapolis: Manchester University Press; University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

2.Poggioli, Renato, Teoria dell’arte d’avanguardia (Bologna: Società editrice il Mulino, 1962). English translation: Poggioli, Renato, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. by Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Mass., London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968).

3.Weightman, John, The Concept of the Avant-Garde. Exploration in Modernism (London: Alcove Press, 1973)

Lina Stergiou is Associate Professor of Architecture at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China, co-founder and creative director of 4Life Strategies, a non-profit organization for strategically design cross-disciplinary actions for life as agencies for change, and principal of LS/Architecture&Strategies, an award-winning design research lab. Independent Expert for the Mies van der Rohe Award-European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture. A Princeton University Research Fellow and recipient of numerous research grants, her research explores spatial politics and the avant-garde, including her forthcoming book on The Concept of the Avant-Garde in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Architecture.

Open seminar

Date: Wednesday, 8 March 2017, 6:30pm followed by drinks at 8:30pm

Place: 33 First floor front and back, Architectural Association, London

Open seminar on architectural theory in conjunction with the launch of special issues of the book and the journal both titled This Thing Called Theory, an outcome of the 12th international conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) ‘This Thing Called Theory’, held in November 2015 at the Leeds School of Architecture.

Proposed schedule:

18:30: Welcome and Introduction

Simos Yannas (AA)

Research and research degrees at the AA

18:35: AHRA presentation

Jonathan Hale (University of Nottingham and AHRA co-founder)

Research and academic networks

18:40: Book series presentation 

Jonathan Hale (University of Nottingham and Routledge Critiques series editor)

Critiques, critical studies in architectural humanities

18:45: Journal presentation

Diana Periton (Architecture & Culture)

Architecture & Culture, what architecture might be and what it can do

18:50: Conference, book and journal presentation

Teresa Stoppani (Leeds Beckett University)

Doreen Bernath (AA and Leeds Beckett University)

This Thing Called Theory

19:00: Architecture and History

Marco De Michelis (Bocconi University Milan and IUAV Venice), The Death of Architecture

19:20: Architecture and Philosophy

Mark Cousins (AA), In Praise of Betrayal

19:40: Architecture and Politics

Pippo Ciorra (University of Camerino and MAXXI Architettura, Rome), Curating Architecture and the (Un)political

 

20:00: Discussion

Respondents, Marina Lathouri (AA) and Douglas Spencer (AA)

Moderators, Doreen Bernath and Teresa Stoppani

 

20:30 – 21:30

This Thing called Theory

Book and journal launch and drink reception

Further information is available:

 

On the conference This Thing Called Theory

http://www.thisthingcalledtheory.org/

 

On the book  This Thing Called Theory

Edited by Teresa Stoppani, Giorgio Ponzo, George Themistokleous

Abingdon, Oxford and New York: Routledge, 2016

https://www.routledge.com/This-Thing-Called-Theory/Stoppani-Ponzo-Themistokleous/p/book/9781138223004

 

On the journal ‘This Thing Called Theory’

Architecture & Culture Volume 4 Issue 3 (2016)

edited by Doreen Bernath and Braden Engel

http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rfac20/4/3?nav=tocList

 

Image: Preview of the cover ‘ARCHITECTURE AND CULTURE,’ VOLUME FOUR, ISSUE THREE 11/2016, Routledge.

seminar with PhD students

Date: Wednesday, 8 March 2017, 1-3pm

Place: 33 First floor back, Architectural Association, London (tbc)

This afternoon seminar prior to the evening event provides a smaller and more informal setting for PhD students to meet with This Thing Called Theory editors Teresa Stoppani, Doreen Bernath and Giorgio Ponzo, and George Themistokleous (Skype) and Braden Engel (Skype), to unravel highlights and polemics of This Thing Called Theory through its conference and publications. Furthermore, these will lead to a wider discussion on unconventional aspects and the nitty-gritty of academic work in the field of architecture, ranging from research networks, conference organisation, panel and paper selections, expansion from textual to multi-media contents, editing and reviewing publications, multi-disciplinary engagements, etc.

We would like to suggest the following readings, as you can select one or two to read prior to the seminar, as a basis for discussion: articles written by some of our guest speakers in the evening seminar, as well as an example of an article published in the journal by Martín Cobas in midst of his doctoral studies at Princeton University School of Architecture.

We recommend the following texts for the better understanding of the topics to be discussed:

• Readings extracted from the book This Thing Called Theory
  

‘Introduction’ by Teresa Stoppani Giorgio Ponzo and George Themistokleous
‘Manfredo Tafuri and the death of architecture’ by Marco De Michelis
‘(Un)political’ by Pippo Ciorra
‘Repositioning. Having ideas’ by Mario Carpo

• Readings extracted from the journal special issue This Thing Called Theory
  

‘Introduction’ by Doreen Bernath and Braden Engel
‘Theory’s Doubt: History, Theory and Image in Robin Evans’s Physiognomy of Morals’ by Martín Cobas

Image: Robin Evans, “The Fabrication of Virtue.” Poster of the exhibition held in the Architectural Association Members Room, 11-28
February, 1976.

 

Organised and hosted by Marina Lathouri

Series: HCT / PhD Debates
Date: 10/3/2017
Time: 10:00:00
Venue: 37 FFF

HCT/PHD Debates

The HCT Debates provide a venue for exchange of ideas and arguments. External speakers are invited every week to present and engage with tutors and students. The aim is to position the multiple voices making possible a process of thinking in common, by definition a pedagogical practice different from the seminar or the lecture. The sessions are open to the public.

The Politics of Violence as/against/through Architecture

The past decade has seen a growing body of literature explore the interface of architecture and violence. If this has helped undo such normative dichotomies as war versus peace, destruction versus construction, and barbarism versus civilisation, it has also further complicated the problem of how critical analysis negotiates the dynamics between particularity and universality, description and prescription, and structure and agency. Against this background, this seminar discusses the limitations and possibilities of understanding violence and architecture as intimately entangled with one another. In light of two texts and other relevant cases, we will explore the following questions. How might an architectural history and theory of violence be different from other histories and theories of it? In what ways might an understanding of architecture as a slow or covert mode of violence challenge dominant histories and theories of the built environment? And, ultimately, what are the political stakes involved in considering violence as inherent in architecture, and architecture as a force that institutionalises, legitimises and even produces violence rather than as its other? Eray will introduce the topic in the first third of the seminar, which will be followed by group discussion. Attendees are kindly asked to think of cases from various historical or geographical contexts they find relevant to the material discussed in the readings, and bring to the seminar a short note on and an image of one such case.

Image: Turkey installs the “Modular Border Security System” along its border with Syria (Ömer Ürer, 26.04.2016)

Texts:

Herscher, Andrew (2008) Warchitectural Theory, Journal of Architectural Education 61(3): 35-43

Weizman, Eyal (2007) Urban Warfare, Hollow Land, London: Verso, pp.185-218.

 

Eray Çaylı, PhD (UCL, 2015), works at the interface of architecture and anthropology. He is interested in the ways in which the built environment shapes and is shaped by conflict, disaster, and protest, especially in the contexts of Turkey and London. Eray currently teaches Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett and at Syracuse University (London programme), and works as a researcher at the LSE’s European Institute. Further information (including publications) is available at www.eraycayli.com

Date: Monday 6 March 2017
Time: 10:30 – 12:00
Venue: AA PhD room Bedford Square, 33 Ground Floor Back

Shiqiao Li (BA Tsinghua Beijing, AAGradDip, PhD AA/Birkbeck) is author of Understanding the Chinese City, Power and Virtue: Architecture and Intellectual Change in England 1650-1730, and editor, with Esther Lorenz, of Kowloon Cultural District. He is Weedon Professor at the University of Virginia, teaches architectural design and theory, and lectured worldwide. He practiced architecture in London and Hong Kong, and taught at AA, NUS, and CUHK.

Image: Pudong, Shanghai, reposted from AA Lectures Online (http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/VIDEO/lecture.php?ID=3630)

Organised and hosted by Marina Lathouri

Series: HCT / PhD Debates
Date: 3/3/2017
Time: 11:00:00
Venue: 33 FFF

HCT/PHD Debates

The HCT Debates provide a venue for exchange of ideas and arguments. External speakers are invited every week to present and engage with tutors and students. The aim is to position the multiple voices making possible a process of thinking in common, by definition a pedagogical practice different from the seminar or the lecture. The sessions are open to the public.

Flat White: incipient Modernist architecture in late Wilhelmine Germany

Image: Heinrich Tessenow, Alexander von Salzmann, Festspielhaus, Dresden-Hellerau, Germany. Views of interior of the Festival Hall, looking towards the stage (north) and towards the audience (south), (1913). Source: ‘Das junge Hellerau’, in Bildunsanstalt Jaques-Dalcroze (ed.) Der Rhythmus. Ein Jahrbuch (Jena, 1913).

The early years of the twentieth century witnessed remarkable advances in architecture emanating from Germany in matters technical, aesthetic and functional. The hiatus of the First World War interrupted this flowering of the art of building, which nonetheless resumed during the years of ferment of the Weimar Republic. On the northern outskirts of Dresden a settlement was founded, taking inspiration from English Arts and Crafts endeavours in Reform design and living culture, but with a pronounced Nietzschean ‘will to form’ all-encompassing in its reach. Here was a garden city with real industry at its heart (the progressive furniture factory of the Deutsche Werkstätten) and a magnificent performance space at its periphery, to which the great and the good of European society would come on pilgrimage.
The spare, unadorned houses designed by the quiet Mecklenburg architect Heinrich Tessenow (1876-1950) gave way to the spiritual and artistic centre of the settlement, his great festival theatre and School of Eurhythmy. A building which at first glance seems a correct and prim exercise in understated Neoclassicism turns out to be nothing short of revolutionary in its concision of internal planning, purity and simplicity of surface, and manipulation of light. It is an inspiring example of a building as product of a variety of artistic and social impulses, orchestrated by the tactful skill of its young architect, one which presages the collaborative work of the Bauhaus in Dessau some 15 years later. Its main performance space has qualities that would not make it unusual to find in the twenty-first century: its surfaces are smooth and pale, and emit light, shimmering like a reversed lampshade.
Between the economy of sachlich, functional terraced and paired houses and the stately Festspielhaus, designed to accommodate and give shape to emerging Reform ideas of pedagogy, dance and music (such as the eurhythmy dabbled in by D. H. Lawrence’s heroines), key traits of Modernist aesthetics were born, uniting the various arts and paving the way for the prevailing look of the twentieth century, one that is arguably still with us in the twenty-first: flat white.

Texts

Gerald Adler, ‘The German Reform Theatre: Heinrich Tessenow and Eurhythmic Performance Space at Dresden-Hellerau’, in Alistair Fair (ed.), Setting the Scene: perspectives on twentieth-century theatre architecture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 35-59

Kathleen James-Chakraborty, ‘Spectacle’, in Kathleen James-Chakraborty, German Architecture for a Mass Audience (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 70-94

Heinrich Tessenow, Hausbau und dergleichen (Berlin, 1916). Extracts from House-building and such Things in Richard Burdett and Wilfried Wang (eds), On Rigour (London: 9H, 1990), ‘Order’, pp17-19; ‘Ornament, pp. 27-30

Gerald Adler runs the Masters in Architecture and Urban Design programme at the University of Kent, where he is Deputy Head of School. His practice experience has been with Kammerer and Belz in Stuttgart, Georg Heinrichs in Berlin, Burkard Meyer Steiger in Baden, Switzerland, Hampshire County Architects in Winchester, Koichi Nagashima in Tokyo, and Ted Cullinan in London. His PhD was on the early twentieth-century German architect Heinrich Tessenow, and his monograph on the mid-twentieth-century British architectural practice Maguire & Murray was published in 2012.  He has written on the ‘Bauhaus bioconstructivist’ Siegfried Ebeling and co-edited the AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association) book Scale: imagination, perception and practice in architecture (2012). His chapter ‘The German Reform Theatre: Heinrich Tessenow and Eurhythmic Performance Space at Dresden-Hellerau’ was published in Alistair Fair (ed.), Setting the Scene: Perspectives on Twentieth-Century Theatre Architecture (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015). Most recently, he has published ‘Pragmatics: towards a theory of things’ in This Thing Called Theory (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016) and is working on an account of the Berlin architect Myra Warhaftig for the AHRA Architecture and Feminisms book.