Situating Architecture Lecture Series

The Situating Architecture lecture series is open to all, but especially to postgraduate students. The series showcases the latest research of leading architectural scholars and has a particular focus on applying new and diverse methodologies and critical theories to architecture and cities. Each talk offers timely, exciting historical, theoretical and critical interpretations of architecture, cities, urban spaces, creative practices and their representations. 

This series is curated by the Architectural History MA Programme Directors; Professor Barbara Penner and Dr Robin Wilson. 

Image: Andrew Todd, Scenography for 'Totem: a Common Sense,' Esch-sur-Alzette European Capital of Culture, 2022 

Schedule

CANCELLED 23 October | 18:00 | Elke Krasny 

Due to unforseen circumstances this lecture has been cancelled. 

On Feminist Recovery: Building Infrastructures of Care

In response to militaristic language that framed political speech and public imaginaries of care in times of the pandemic catastrophe, activists, policy makers, and researchers, collectively wrote feminist recovery plans. Rooted in a care feminism, these feminist recovery plans, among others, by policy makers and health workers in Hawai’i, by the NAWI Collective, a pan-African feminist initiative and by the National Women’s Council in Ireland, imagine a world beyond Covid-19 aiming to prevent a return to business as usual. This lecture introduces the central ideas and aims introduced by these recovery plans and highlights how they sought to work for future pandemic preparedness and to prevent the return to business as usual. Recovery is a term used in the context of medicine, health and healing, but also in the contexts of economies as well as for the periods of rebuilding after times of war. Architecture is therefore central to rebuilding lives during the periods of recovery.

Examining how materiality and meaning come together in processes of recovery, the lecture raises the following questions to examine how architecture is meaningful and relevant to building feminist recovery: How can architecture become a practice that contributes to healing from the aftermath of colonial imperial capitalist supremacist patriarchy? What is the role of architecture in processes of depatriarchalization, decarbonization, and decolonization? How can architecture contribute to recovery by finding ways to spatialize and materialize emancipation and transformation? How can architecture build infrastructures of care?

Speaker

Professor Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna focuses on concerns of care, reproductive labor, social and environmental justice, commemorative practices and transnational feminisms in architecture, infrastructures, urbanism, and the arts. Krasny was a fellow at the CCA Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her curatorial work on hands-on urbanism was shown at the 2012 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Together with Angelika Fitz she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (MIT Press, 2019). Her book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript publishers, 2023) focuses on militarized care essentialism and feminist recovery plans in pandemic times.

13 November | 18:00 | Jingru (Cyan) Cheng

Pond, Yard, Pine Woods: Stories of Rippling

The talk will discuss the transdisciplinary project RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING (https://rrr.network/), working with Shigushan village in Wuhan, China since 2015. A site of both labour supply and resource extraction, the mundane village life and landscape embody the social and ecological consequences and dependences of China’s urbanisation. 

Villagers in Shigushan are part of the country’s 295 million rural migrant workers, who dissolve their families as a survival tactic and take turns to float between workplaces in the city and the home village. What has emerged are indeterminate and resilient assemblages that stretch spatially from house to territory, coordinate temporally from daily to multi-year cycles, and manifest as bodily dispositions in everyday life. The precarious livelihood of rural migrant workers is a temporary, transient state that has become part of a broader structure rather than an exception. While such a state is at once the result of systemic inequality, subject to symbolic violence and self-imposed, RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING rejects flat victim narratives that often reinscribe marginalised communities as depleted and damaged. 

Through a situated perspective with a focus on the home village side, the project attunes to how villagers make worlds, from opportunistic reparation of scarred landscapes to networks of care that extend and transgress familial bonds. Such attunement also entails a process-oriented method at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, filmmaking and performance. From participant observation to performative improvisation to collective happening, this project is a long-term commitment to a place, its marginalised community, and their agency, complicity and resistance rooted in precarity. 

The talk will wrap up with a brief overview of the on-going project TRACING SAND. With rural migrant workers and sand being different kinds of drifting bodies, the focus remains on the entangled flows of people, life forms, matter and the built environment to unpack the interconnectedness and interdependency of our time.

Speaker

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to draw out latent relations across scales, confronting intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cyan was awarded the Harvard GSD’s 2023 Wheelwright Prize for TRACING SAND, two commendations from the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) President’s Awards for Research in 2018 and 2020, and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival in 2023, all as part of RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING. Cyan’s work has been exhibited internationally, as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020-22), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others, and included in the Architectural Association’s permanent collection. Cyan holds a PhD by Design from the Architectural Association (AA) and was the co-director of AA Wuhan Visiting School (2015-17). She currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London. 

27 November | 18:00 | David Serlin

Helen Keller and the Urban Archive

In this talk, David Serlin examines episodes and artifacts from the life of Helen Keller (1880-1968), the famous American deafblind author and advocate, in order to think critically about the relationship between disability and urban modernity in the twentieth century. For Keller, touch and smell (and the synesthetic overlaps between them) functioned as primary modalities for encountering architecture and public space in cities like New York and Paris. Drawing upon materials from what David calls Keller’s “urban archive,” he argues that Keller’s example gives us critical tools for thinking about the experiential dimensions of disability, both for historical interpretation as well as for its relevance to contemporary design practice.

Speaker

David Serlin (pronouns: he/him/his) is Professor of Communication and Science Studies, and affiliated faculty in Critical Gender Studies and the Interdisciplinary Group in Cognitive Science, at UC San Diego. He is also a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome, where he was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture in 2020. His books include Replaceable You: Engineering the Body in Postwar America (University of Chicago Press, 2004), Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics (co-editor; NYU Press, 2002); Keywords for Disability Studies (co-editor; NYU Press, 2015); and Window Shopping with Helen Keller: Architecture and Disability in Modern Culture (University of Chicago Press, forthcoming 2024). Outside of academia, Serlin also writes books for children. He is the author of the New York Times-bestselling beginning reader Baby Monkey, Private Eye (Scholastic, 2018), which was illustrated by his husband, Brian Selznick. They live in San Diego, California, and Brooklyn, New York.  

This lecture is available live on Surface Hub: Join on Surface Hub

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15 January | 18:00 | Andrew Todd, Ron Henderson and Marion Waller - Room G.12

Three Voices on Nature

An architect, an urbanist and curator, and a landscape architect, all of whose paths have collaboratively crossed in various ways, will give a polyvocal account of contemporary approaches to the natural world, focusing on books they have respectively published in English in the last 6 months.

Andrew Todd is an architect and writer. His book The Clearing (Nybrogade Press, 2023) describes trees as protagonists of architecture and agents of economy, ecology, mythology, biology and anthropology, invoking figures such as Vitruvius, Peter Brook, Joseph Hooker, Bruno Latour, Davy Crockett and Donald Trump.

Marion Waller is an urbanist and curator; she directs the Pavillon de l‘Arsenal in Paris. Her book Natural Artefacts (Nybrogade Press 2023) describes and theorises the complexities inherent in natural-human interactions and the dangers of oversimplifying these relations in actions of repair and restoration.

Ron Henderson is principal of LIRIO Landscape Architecture and professor at IIT (Chicago). His book 30 Trees and Why Landscape Architects Love Them (es editor, Birkhauser, 2023) presents a global panorama of design affinities based on species, from contributors including Maria Villalobos, Laurie Olin and Andrew Todd.

Collectively, their presentations will open questions in the contemporary debate concerning the natural and built worlds, from the foundations of histories to urgent contemporary political debate and action.

22 January | 18:00 | Charles Rice - Room 6.02

The Void at the Heart of Architecture

In the 1970s, a void opened at the heart of architecture. In hotels, offices, public buildings and commercial centres, the atrium emerged globally to challenge the modernist legacies of form and function, altering the pattern and experience of cities. While often appearing at vast scale and to striking effect, the atrium also became omnipresent and mundane. The lecture will offer a tour through the themes and case studies of Rice’s new book Atrium (MIT Press, 2023), charting the atrium’s appearance and development as it accompanied profound shifts in the discipline and practice of architecture.

Speaker

Charles Rice is Professor of Architecture at the University of Technology Sydney. He is author of The Emergence of the Interior: Architecture, Modernity, Domesticity (2007), Interior Urbanism: Architecture, John Portman and Downtown America (2016) and Atrium (2023). From 2012 to 2019 he was co-editor then editor-in-chief of The Journal of Architecture. His research has been funded by the Australian Research Council and the Graham Foundation, and in 2022 he was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Michigan.

5 February | 18:00 | Kuba Szreder

The ABC of the Projectariat: Precarious conditions of labour in creative industries: an Aleatoric performance and discussion

Event co-hosted with the PPV (Perverting the Power Vertical: Politics & Aesthetics) platform at the FRINGE Centre, UCL SSEES / UCL IAS.

Freelance artists, designers and architects do projects in order to make a living. Those mobile projectarians roam the art world, where enthusiasm is paired with exclusion, mobility with poverty, self-entrepreneurialism with anxiety. Writer, curator and activist Kuba Szreder will dissect the ups and downs of this unpredictable existence in an aleatoric lecture, performing a random selection of entries from his recently published book The ABC of the Projectariat (2021). Beginning with “A is for Aftermath (of the pandemic)”, and concluding with “Y is for You are Not Alone”, this handbook addresses both the daily grind of projectarians through entries such as “A is for Applications” and “D is for Deadlines” and the systemic conditions of their labour. It reveals a harsh reality of winner-takes-it-all economy, structurally marked by competition and exclusion. Szreder’s performative lecture will be followed by an open discussion, focused on the practical modes of coping with the systemic pressures of highly networked world, devised and tested by projectarians themselves, such as interdependent self-organisation, mutual support, and other forms of action, art strikes, productive withdrawals, political struggles and better social time machines.

Speaker

Kuba Szreder is a lecturer in the department of art theory at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, who combines his research with interdependent curatorial practice. He has made over a hundred projects as a freelance curator, writer, lecturer, and organiser. He has co-initiated and cooperated with numerous collectives, research clusters and artistic trade unions on local and international scales, such as Free/Slow University of Warsaw, the Centre for Plausible Economies in London and the Office for Postartistic Practices in Poland. He is author and editor of multiple readers, articles, and book chapters on theory and sociology of contemporary art. His latest is The ABC of the Projectariat: Living and Working in a Precarious Art World (2021). In this short lexicon, Szreder argues that, just as proletarians had nothing to lose but their chains, the projectarians have nothing to miss but their deadlines.

19 February | 18:00 | Iulia Statica

Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production, and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest

Urban Phantasmagorias examines the legacies of socialist housing in the city of Bucharest during the period of communist rule in Romania. The book explores the manner in which the socialist state reconfigured the city through concrete acts of demolition and construction, as well as indirectly through legal frameworks aimed at the regulation of women’s reproductive agency, in an attempt to materialize its idea of modernity. It follows the effects of this state agenda with a focus on the period between 1965 and 1989 through an investigation of the transformations, representations, meanings, and uses of domestic spaces.

The book draws on Walter Benjamin’s concept of phantasmagoria, which provides a critical framework through which it articulates the dynamic relationship between ideology, architecture, and everyday practices, and reassesses their impact upon individual subjectivity and agency.

The woman emerges as a central subject of the book, upon whom the phantasmagoric effects of the socialist state’s modernizing agenda have an acute impact at the level of lived domesticity and everyday life. Through a focus on the lived experiences of women, the book illuminates the prismatic effect of the state’s infrastructural and legal intentions, including the ways in which these were subverted through women’s lived bodily experiences of the home.

The book establishes, both theoretically and through the concrete case of the city of Bucharest, the methodological significance of Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria as an epistemological approach to a modern communist cityscape. 

Speaker

Iulia Statica is a Lecturer in Urban Design at the School of Architecture at the University of Sheffield. Her research focuses on the relationship between gender and domesticity in the development and transformation of housing infrastructures and urban landscapes in Eastern Europe and Latin America. She obtained her PhD from The University of Rome La Sapienza, and between 2019-21 she was the Marie Curie Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

11 March | 18:00 | Elke Krasny - Hybrid Event Room 1.02 or Surface Hub available

On Feminist Recovery: Building Infrastructures of Care

In response to militaristic language that framed political speech and public imaginaries of care in times of the pandemic catastrophe, activists, policy makers and researchers collectively wrote feminist recovery plans. Rooted in a care feminism, these feminist recovery plans by policy makers and health workers in Hawai’i, by the NAWI Collective, a pan-African feminist initiative and by the National Women’s Council in Ireland, imagine a world beyond Covid-19 aiming to prevent a return to business as usual. This lecture introduces the central ideas and aims introduced by these recovery plans and highlights how they sought to work for future pandemic preparedness and to prevent the return to business as usual. Recovery is a term used in the context of medicine, health and healing, but also in the contexts of economies as well as for the periods of rebuilding after times of war. Architecture is therefore central to rebuilding lives during the periods of recovery.

Examining how materiality and meaning come together in processes of recovery, the lecture raises the following questions to examine how architecture is meaningful and relevant to building feminist recovery: How can architecture become a practice that contributes to healing from the aftermath of colonial, imperial, capitalist, supremacist patriarchy? What is the role of architecture in processes of depatriarchalisation, decarbonisation, and decolonisation? How can architecture contribute to recovery by finding ways to spatialise and materialise emancipation and transformation? How can architecture build infrastructures of care?

Speaker

Professor Elke Krasny, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna focuses on concerns of care, reproductive labor, social and environmental justice, commemorative practices and transnational feminisms in architecture, infrastructures, urbanism, and the arts. Krasny was a fellow at the CCA Canadian Centre for Architecture. Her curatorial work on hands-on urbanism was shown at the 2012 Venice Biennale for Architecture. Together with Angelika Fitz she edited Critical Care. Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet (MIT Press, 2019). Her book Living with an Infected Planet. Covid-19 Feminism and the Global Frontline of Care (transcript publishers, 2023) focuses on militarised care essentialism and feminist recovery plans in pandemic times.

Please note this is a hybrid event. Elke Krasne will be joining remotely. For those who would like to join the audience in person, come to Rm. 1.02, 22 Gordon Street. Otherwise, this lecture is available live on Surface Hub.

Join on Surface Hub