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Thomas Wilkinson

Tom Wilkinson

t.m.wilkinson@ucl.ac.uk

Thesis

Art History for the Masses: Mediatising the Discipline in Germany 1900-1940

Before and during the Weimar Republic, the development of technologies like radio, film, and photo books allowed figures from within and beyond the academy to communicate with mass audiences, so producing new publics around the discussion of art and architecture.

Biography

Tom Wilkinson completed a BA in Fine Art at Central St Martins before living in China for three years. After returning to the UK he studied for a Postgraduate Diploma at the Courtauld Institute, and then a Masters in History of Art at UCL. Since 2010 he has been working on a PhD at UCL supervised by Professor Frederic Schwartz.

Selected Publications

(Book) Bricks and Mortals: Ten Great Buildings and the People They Made (Bloomsbury, 2014).

(Article) 'The Polemical Snapshot: Architectural Photography in the Age of Social Media', The Architectural Review (January 2015).

(Video) 'Robin Hood Gardens: Requiem for a Dream', The Architectural Review (November, 2014).

(Article) 'Olympic afterlife: the real legacy of the games for Stratford', The Guardian (8/8/2014).

(Article) 'Typology: Opera Houses', The Architectural Review (October, 2013).

(Co-authored book, contributed 13 entries) Masters of Photography (Goodman, 2013).

Research Interests

Twentieth-century Architecture, Film, Photography, Radio, Publics, Weimar Germany, Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, Adolf Behne.

Papers

'Architecture parlante: the Building and the Voice in the Age of Technological Reproducibility', The Visual and the Verbal, University of Brighton (2015).

'"Vom Dombuch zum Domfilm": Gothic Architecture between Moving and Still Photography', Weimar Photography in Context, Wadham College, University of Oxford (2015).

'In Violable Walls: Gender and Transparency in Eileen Gray's villa E.1027', Bath University School of Architecture (2014).

'Architecture on the Radio: Walter Benjamin's Broadcasts for Children', PhD Research Projects Conference, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London (2014).

'Radio, Photograph, Disaster: Walter Benjamin Performs the Caption', German Studies Association Annual Conference, University of Milwaukee (2012).

'Art History on the Radio: Walter Benjamin and Wilhelm Pinder 1930/1940', University College London (2012).

Teaching

2011-2012: Art in London course on Modern Architecture, Department of the History of Art, UCL.

Editorial Work

History Editor of the Architectural Review (ongoing)

Selected Publication

Bricks & Mortals

We don't just look at buildings: their facades, beautiful or ugly, conceal the spaces we inhabit. We are born, work, love and die in architecture. We buy and sell it, rent it and squat in it, create and destroy it. These aspects of buildings - economic, erotic, political and psychological - are crucial if we are to understand architecture properly. And because architecture moulds us just as much as we mould it, understanding architecture helps us to understand our lives and our world. Through ten great buildings across the world Tom Wilkinson reveals the powerful and intimate relationship between society and architecture and asks: can architecture change our lives for the better?