Inaugural Lecture: Professor Eva Branscome

About

Eva Branscome delivers her inaugural professorial lecture, hosted and introduced by Jacqui Glass, Dean of The Bartlett Faculty. This lecture will take place in the Christopher Ingold Auditorium, Entrance from 22 Gordon Street, UCL at 18:30 GMT followed by a reception in The Bartlett School of Architecture Exhibition Space, 22 Gordon Street. 

Please note capacity is limited and seats are first come, first seated. You will need to show your Eventbrite ticket on entry. 

Abstract

The Heritage of Heritage 

This inaugural lecture discusses the growing importance of acknowledging the realities and multiplicities of heritage. It positions Professor Branscome’s intellectual contribution to the field as a critique and challenge to existing narratives: questioning first the idea that heritage is not a creative field, the second that heritage is inherently elitist, and the third that heritage is fundamentally about a positive cultural contribution.

Heritage is instead a process and intervention. As part of the built environment deemed important enough to be spared demolition, and as such constituting a more permanent part of our everyday lives, the designated historic buildings, urban settings and landscapes serve not only to remind us of the past through their physical evidence but also reach into the here-and-now. They embody a persistent agency that validates or excludes groups of people and their lived experiences. Absence of heritage environments or the exclusion of more complicated historical layers has a similar effect.

Now that more objects, situations and enactments are considered heritage, and that more cultures are claiming their turn to determine what they are about through architecture, understanding the mechanisations of ‘the heritage of heritage’ is an increasingly urgent factor in understanding ingrained social injustice and embracing inclusion.

Biography

Eva Branscome is a Professor of Architecture and Cultural Heritage at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Originally trained as an interior architect, her research work follows two strands: the links between built heritage and cultural practices in contemporary cities, and the modern architectural history of Central Europe.

These research and teaching topics intersect with her extensive knowledge of and experience in British architectural heritage. Eva’s role as caseworker for the Twentieth Century Society placed her at the forefront of determining the future preservation of the ‘modern historic’ environment in Britain, with 50+ buildings now under historic statutory protection following her successful applications.

She is increasingly engaged in examining architecture’s complicity with social injustice, as seen by the 2023 SAHGB conference she co-organised, titled ‘Constructing Coloniality: British Imperialism and the Built Environment’. In July 2024 she co-organised the ground-breaking conference, 'Ongoing and Emerging Discourses in African Architectural Practices', at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. That major international conference is to date by far the largest and most significant event hosted in Africa about the historical and contemporary architecture of the continent and its diasporic populations. Eva writes about difficult/contested heritage including the toppled statue of Bristol slave-trader Edward Colston.

More information

Image: Red Venetian Trade Beads on Cracked Concrete: Intersections of Architecture and Material Culture