Situating Architecture Lecture Series 2024/25

Every Dataset is a Canon: Generative AI and the (unexpected) Return of Imitation and Styles

Generative AI does not create new images out of thin air; it generates images that have a “certain something” in common with a selection of images we have fed into it.  This selection, often called a “dataset,” can be generic or custom-made; either way, Generative AI automates the imitation and replication of some of its common visual features, often known in the past as styles.  Imitation was for centuries the backbone of the classical tradition in European art, and it was de facto banned by 20th-century modernism for many good reasons.  As the rise of Generative AI is bringing the practice of imitation back to our design schools and to the design professions, we urgently need to learn again what imitation is, how it works, what it does, and how we can deal with it today, in critical and creative terms.  Every dataset is a canon, but every reference to precedent is based on preference, and we know all too well that preference is often a proxy for prejudice.

Speaker

Mario Carpo, is an architectural historian and critic, and is currently the inaugural Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Prof. Carpo's research and publications focus on the history of early modern architecture and on the theory and criticism of contemporary design and technology.  His most recent book is Beyond Digital: Design and Automation at the End of Modernity, published by the MIT Press.  

Attempting to Understand Socialist Architecture and the Built Environment: Experiments, Methods, and Tools

Interpretations of socialist heritage are often limited or one-dimensional. A more nuanced, critical analysis demands an expansion of methods, knowledge, and interdisciplinary approaches. In this talk, Jenia Gubkina will share insights from her academic and activist work, showcasing the interdisciplinary methodology she applies across various architectural, artistic, and educational projects. This approach allows her to unearth deeper social, political, and historical narratives through the lens of architecture and the built environment, with a particular emphasis on the tools and perspectives she employs. As part of the lecture, there will be a screening of the short documentary You See, Time Becomes Space Here. Filmed before the outbreak of the full-scale war in Ukraine, the documentary was created within the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture multimedia project. Directed by Tetjana Kononenko in collaboration with architectural historian Jenia Gubkina, the film reflects on the intersection of power, personal experience, and microhistory within the urban landscape. The documentary centres on Kharkiv’s Svobody Square, a monumental modernist urban planning project from the 1920s–1930s, highlighted by its main feature, the Derzhprom (House of State Industry) – the first Soviet skyscraper, constructed between 1925 and 1928, in what was then the capital of Soviet Ukraine.

Speaker

Ievgeniia 'Jenia' Gubkina is a Ukrainian architect, architectural and urban historian, and curator, with a focus on 20th-century architecture and urban planning in Ukraine. Her work takes an interdisciplinary approach to heritage studies. In 2014, she co-founded the NGO Urban Forms Center, a leading organisation in Ukraine dedicated to the study and promotion of modernist heritage, addressing gender issues in architecture, and exploring experimental approaches in architectural education. In 2020–2021, Jenia curated the Encyclopedia of Ukrainian Architecture, an online multimedia project that blended architecture, history, documentary, and visual arts. She authored four books, such as Slavutych: Architectural Guide (2015) and Soviet Modernism. Brutalism. Post-Modernism. Buildings and Structures in Ukraine, 1955–1991 (2019). Jenia's most recent book, Being a Ukrainian Architect During Wartime, was released in 2023, offering insights into her experiences against the backdrop of the war. She is a tutor and lecturer at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Not a History of Reconstruction: Tracing the Erratic Movements of London's Bombed Landscape from 1940: Reflections on Artistic and Historiographical Research 

During the aerial bombardment of London in the years 1940 to 1945 at least 116,483 buildings were ‘totally demolished’ by bombing or otherwise ‘damaged beyond repair’. Many millions of tonnes of debris were cleared from London’s bombed landscape during these years representing a massive processing and movement of materials. This talk will reflect on recent research into this and other ‘erratic’ movements that can be traced from London’s bombed landscape through a focus on various ways that it was measured and quantified, and the role that this landscape took in the formation of new knowledges; including new militarised knowledge.

A great deal of work in architectural history has focused on the rebuilding and reconstruction of British cities, particularly London, following 1945. Prompted by the thinking of Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, working in the field of visual cultures, this work aims to shift focus away from the historian’s construction of the ‘postwar’, suggesting as it does that ‘war’ ended in 1945. The talk will share and reflect on an artistically driven process of historiographical practice that occurs through archival and site research and an expanded photographic practice. An aim of this practice being to think through the temporalities that historical narratives are built upon, and their relationships to the present.

Speaker

Danielle Hewitt is an artist and historian, trained in both Fine Art Practice and Architectural History. She recently completed a PhD in Architectural History at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL supported by The Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Danielle teaches Landscape Architecture MA/MLA and Architectural and Interdisciplinary Studies BSc at The Bartlett. She is also a Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University where she teaches across Art, Architecture and Photography. 

*Note, in Christopher Ingold Ramsay Lecture Theatre G21 – this is a lecture theatre right next door in 20 Gordon Street

Community Architecture Between Left and Right in Post-War Britain

This lecture explores the politically mercurial history of Britain’s post-war community architecture movement, which called for more participatory approaches to architectural practice and town planning. It gathered momentum across multiple spheres: in grassroots projects; student culture; the underground and mainstream press; architects’ offices; trade unions; the monarchy; The Royal Institute of British Architects; and within the ministerial organs of central government. Holly’s talk will trace the curious migration of the community architecture movement’s arguments, from their emergence in leftist counter-culture in the 1960s and 1970s to their redeployment by figures on the right by the 1980s.

Speaker

Holly Smith is an urban historian and Fellow of St John’s College at the University of Cambridge. She was previously a Wolfson Scholar during her doctorate at University College London. Her first book, Up in the Air: A History of High-Rise Britain, is being published by Verso next year. 

The Gathering Grounds: A Journey Through an Infrastructural Landscape in Image, Text and Sound

This talk will present and discuss The Gathering Grounds, a narrated, image, text and sonic journey through a reservoir landscape in southern England. A collaborative work by Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson), sound artist Iain Chambers, and narrated by James O’Leary, The Gathering Grounds is a product of mixed methods of research and making – archival, photographic, curatorial, sonic, and fictional. The talk will think through conceptions of rural utopias and the emancipatory impulses behind rural walking practices, reflecting on the contested, infrastructural terrain revealed in The Gathering Grounds, in which a regional, modernist, architectural history is encountered within a dramatic, mise-en-scène of conflicting land-use.

Speaker

Dr Robin Wilson is co director of Architectural History MA and teaches across post graduate history and theory courses at The Bartlett School of Architecture. Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson) is a collaborative art practice founded in 1998 to explore the legacy of modernism, from centre to margins. 

Something Completely Different: Architecture in Belgium

*This event is co-sponsored by The Bartlett School of Architecture and the School of European Languages, Culture and Society.  With thanks to the support by the Diplomatic Representation of Flanders in the United Kingdom.

Since the foundation of the country in 1830, architecture in Belgium has been an expression of the key issues of modern Western societies. In this lecture, Christophe Van Gerrewey introduces his new book, Something Completely Different, published by MIT Press, in which he uses this small European country as a case study to describe, interpret, and criticize more universal spatial problems and behaviors. In seven wide-ranging essays, he looks at the activities of architects from the past two centuries to better understand political evolutions, social gaps, aesthetic considerations, housing and planning, transport and infrastructure, order and chaos, and culture and ecology.

Speaker

Christophe Van Gerrewey is an author and a critic. He is an editor of OASE, journal for architecture, and of De Witte Raaf, a bimonthly magazine on art and culture. He has taught architecture theory from 2015 to 2024 at EPFL Lausanne. He writes regularly for periodicals such as Architectural Review, Log, AA Files, El Croquis and Archithese.

Book Launch: Reclaiming Colonial Architecture 

We are located today within cities, landscapes, buildings and material culture thick with the deposits and continuing force of colonial pasts. In this session Tania Sengupta and Stuart King will discuss their freshly published book, Reclaiming Colonial Architecture (RIBA Publishing, 2024), which looks at how we might understand, narrate and critically intervene in the material inheritances of colonialism and imperialism. They will share their conceptual framework for thinking through various demands for justice at stake in our physical environment. Their talk will also introduce some of the on-the-ground responses by architects, urbanists, conservationists, artists, academics and community activists from across the world brought together in the book and reflect on modes of critical practice responsive to the continuing ‘presences’ of colonialism. This will be followed by a conversation of the authors with the architectural historian Neal Shasore.

Speaker

Dr Tania Sengupta is Associate Professor and Co-Director of PhD Research in Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Her research explores postcolonial and transcultural histories of built environment in colonial South Asia and global postcolonial contexts. She is also interested in the inequities stemming from these inheritances today and how we might imagine alternative futures. Tania received the RIBA President’s Medal for Research 2019, is Co-Editor-in-Chief of the journal Architecture Beyond Europe, and Co-curator of the curricular resource (2020) Race and Space: What is ‘Race’ Doing in a Nice Field Like the Built Environment?

Dr Stuart King is a Senior Lecturer in architectural design and history in the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He teaches in architectural history and theory, and coordinates a Master of Urban and Cultural Heritage programme. His research focuses on Australian architectural history since colonisation, historiography and heritage. He is a past president of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand (2011-13) and editor of the society's journal Fabrications: JSAHANZ (2014-2017). Since 2012, Stuart has had a role in statutory heritage management with the Tasmanian Heritage Council.

Respondent 

Dr Neal Shasore is Head of School and Chief Executive of the London School of Architecture. He took up his role in June 2021 having joined the LSA Faculty as Design History Tutor in 2019. Neal is particularly passionate about diversifying architectural education, heritage and practice. An architectural historian by training, his research and writing has primarily focussed on architectural culture in Britain and the Empire in the first half of the twentieth century and this critical perspective informs his own pedagogy and practice. He is a Trustee of the Architectural Heritage Fund and a member of Historic England’s London Advisory Committee. Neal currently leads the Design Think Tank module with Daniel Ovalle Costal.

Sensing a Planet on Fire and Listening with Forests 

Forest fires point to the changing sensory ecologies that could be required to detect and respond to planetary transformations. They can spark and remake collective sensing practices. This presentation draws on fieldwork undertaken in Chile as part of the Smart Forests research project to consider the eco-technical practices and sensory protocols that could be required to act within these post-fire worlds.

Speaker

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment at the University of Cambridge, where she leads the Planetary Praxis research group in the Department of Sociology. Her work can be found at planetarypraxis.org and jennifergabrys.net.

Wretched Waters: Making Modernity and the Southern North Sea

This event will be held in Room 6.02, The Bartlett School of Architecture and will be followed by a drinks reception. All welcome. Please book to attend on Eventbrite in advance. 

Abstract

Histories of modernity have often centred the nation or the empire. When they have turned to transnational matters these have often been studied at oceanic or global scales. This project, instead, starts from a smaller transnational body of water: the southern North Sea, and its Dutch, English and Flemish coasts. It traces how histories of slavery, docks, fishing, migration and infrastructure reshaped the southern North Sea in the long nineteenth century, and the marks left behind in the cities and landscapes of the region today. This talk will explore what it means to put particular sites at the heart of global histories of the environment, and argue for a more transdisciplinary approach to history that can think simultaneously about processes of making historical space and contemporary experience of space. This will focus on three key moments in North Sea history: the creation of urban docklands in the early nineteenth century, the industrialisation of sea fishing in the mid nineteenth century, and migration from Europe to North America around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Contemporary images of North Sea landscapes will frame the historical discussion. Dr Grinsell will suggest that the Anthropocene creates an urgent need for histories that can not only enliven our sense of the past but also position our present as a moment of open contestation where the past is enlisted in support of rival visions of the future.

Speaker Biographies 

Dr Sam Grinsell is a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Dr Grinsell's research concerns water in the making of space, and has appeared in the scholarly journal Environmental History and the edited volume Environment, Agency, and Technology in Urban Life since c.1750. He is currently preparing a monograph, provisionally titled Making Modernity and the Southern North Sea: Journeys in transdisciplinary history, based on his postdoctoral work; his earlier research concerned the British Empire and the River Nile. He is also one of the editors of the Routledge Handbook of Modern Infrastructural History, currently in development, and is, in collaboration with Giulia Champion, running an online event series in May 2025 titled Living With Water: Agency, Materiality, Narratives, which brings together researchers from across disciplines to think together about water.

Professor Richard Staley is the Hans Rausing Lecturer and Professor in History and Philosophy of Science at University of Cambridge and University of Copenhagen. After early work on relativity and the German physics community, over the past decade Prof Staley has focused on climate change, the relations between physics and anthropology and the cultural history of mechanics in teaching and research. In Cambridge he has recently been engaged in two collaborative projects with colleagues in History and Philosophy of Science, English and Geography on climate change, and on Histories of AI. Funded by the Leverhulme Trust from 2019–25, Making Climate History develops a fundamental new perspective on the histories and geographies of climate change by linking making and knowing in the emergence of the climate sciences over the past two centuries.

Dr Giulia Champion is a Research Fellow (Anniversary Fellowship) at University of Southampton. Dr Champion's main research project, entitled (Un)Mediating the Ocean investigates how the seabed is mediated in legal, financial, scientific, infrastructural and cultural documents and interventions as part of the creation of a regulatory framework for deep-sea mining by the International Seabed Authority. The project explores questions about Just Energy Transition, Civil Society engagement with the International Seabed Authority negotiations and In/Tangible Underwater Cultural Heritage. In 2022, she was a Green Transition Fellow at the Greenhouse at the University of Stavanger.