Situating Architecture Lecture Series 2025-26

The Nomadic Shtetl Archive. Mobile Interventions in Post-Jewish Architecture 

We warmly invite you to a public book launch of 'Architecture of Memory' (UCL Press, 2025) by Natalia Romik, co-hosted by the Department of Jewish and Hebrew Studies and the Institute for Polish–Jewish Studies. 

'Architecture of Memory' explores architectural disappearance, urban remembrance and functional change amid social upheaval. Using archival, architectural and artistic methods, Natalia Romik investigates the spectral architecture of former shtetls – predominantly Jewish towns in Central and Eastern Europe before the Second World War. After the war, these towns were repopulated by people of other nationalities, who reused former Jewish properties. Today, traces of the Jewish populations have nearly vanished from urban reality and public discourse. Romik’s work seeks to discover new ways to develop abandoned shtetl architecture, focusing on Jewish heritage sites like synagogue ruins and ritual baths. In her talk, Natalia Romik will also reflect on the artistic performances and architectural interventions which inform her research which confront the ‘present absence’ of former Jewish shtetls.  

The book launch will be followed by celebratory drinks. 

Speaker

Natalia Romik is an architect, designer, artist, and curator. In 2018 Romik was awarded a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London for a thesis Post-Jewish Architecture of Memory within Former Eastern European Shtetls. As consultant with Nizio Design studio (Warsaw) she contributed to the core exhibition design of the Polin Museum of Polish Jews in Warsaw and co-curated its exhibitions Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath (2018) and “(post)JEWISH… Shtetl Opatów Through the Eyes of Mayer Kirshenblatt” (2024). Her research into Jewish hide-outs during the Second World War concluded with the exhibition Hideouts. The Architecture of Survival, presented in 2022 in the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw, and among others, in the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. In 2022, Natalia Romik was awarded Dan David Prize, and in 2025 joined the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin as Yehudit and Yehuda Elkana Fellow.    

How to join

In-person at room 6.02, The Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB. No pre-registration required.

Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire

We warmly invite you to a public book launch of Incorporating Architects (UC Press, 2025) by Aaron Cayer. This event is co-hosted by the Centre for Transnational and Global Histories.

Today, there are architecture and engineering firms that hold more capital than entire countries, employ more people than live in many cities, and rent offices in more nations than are represented in the UN. Within them, architects design not just buildings but urban systems—including the infrastructures, legal codes, and financial mechanisms on which those systems depend. This lecture and conversation draws from 'Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire', Cayer’s new book about the rise of multinational corporate architecture firms. It traces the origins of one such firm, today known as AECOM, revealing how and why architects used the political and economic power of their firm to grip the reins of their profession, expand their role, and shape global politics.

The book launch will be followed by celebratory drinks.

Speaker

Dr Aaron Cayer is a Los Angeles-based historian, writer, and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona. Cayer’s research has been recognized and supported by international awards and fellowships, including a 2025 Carnegie Fellowship from the Carnegie Corporation, a 2024 Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, and a 2021 Thom Fellowship from the Huntington Library. His recent book, Incorporating Architects: How American Architecture Became a Practice of Empire (UC Press, 2025) traces the rise of US-based architecture and engineering corporations, such as AECOM, as well as their impact on professions and politics after World War II. Cayer is trained both as a historian and architect: he received his PhD in Architecture History from UCLA as well as undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture from Norwich University in Vermont. Outside of the academy, he serves on the Board of Directors of The Architecture Lobby and the Advisory Board of the International Archive of Women in Architecture.

How to join

In-person at room G.12, The Bartlett School of Architecture, 22 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0QB. No pre-registration required.

About

In Adolf Loos’s lifetime, Le Corbusier hailed him as the father of modernism, contemporaries flocked to his buildings, his publications rose to become the twentieth century’s most influential architectural texts. Since his death, much scholarship has been dedicated to Loos as a designer and a thinker. Still, one aspect remains almost entirely unconsidered: Loos was deaf.

 Nina Vollenbröker's talk addresses this longstanding scholarly absence. It begins by asking how his differently-sensing body shaped Loos’s spatial experience and, consequently, authorship. Nina scrutinises three key works – ‘Ornament and Crime’, Villa Moller (Vienna), and Villa Müller (Prague) - tracing how the visionary approaches underpinning them related to Loos’s deafness and arguing that they foreshadowed today’s principles of design equity almost a century earlier. 

Next, the talk raises larger questions about accepted understandings of modernism - a movement as whose forerunner Loos is commonly hailed but which relied on highly reductive ways of thinking about human diversity to shape its ideology. It proposes that many deaf bodies – with their distinct ways of being, knowing, and making – were determiners of modernist thought and space, that their work disrupts established problematic narratives, and that it must be firmly knotted into architectural histories.

Speaker

Nina Vollenbröker is Associate Professor and Director of the Architectural Design PhD Programme at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. She also serves as editor for arq: Architectural Research Quarterly. Her research explored intersections of architecture, disability, and deafness, and her most recent publications include ‘Deafening Architectural Modernism: Reconsidering the Archive of Adolf Loos’ (in Jenifer L. Barclay and Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy, Cripping the Archive: Disability, History, and Power, University of Illinois Press, July 2025) and Architecture and Disability (arq special issue edited by Stelios Giamarelos and Nina Vollenbröker, Vol 28.3., Cambridge University Press, September 2025)

How to join

In-person at G.21 Ramsay Lecture Theatre, Christopher Ingold Building, 20 Gordon Street, London WC1H 0AJ

About

Stuart Hall, born in Kingston Jamaica, came to Britain in 1951 to read English at Oxford University. He subsequently became one of the foremost Black intellectuals of the twentieth century—in the formation and transformation of the New Left political movement; in the founding of ‘cultural studies’ as a field of research; through his public interventions on mass media, culture and politics; his accounts of the historical formations of race and class; his identification of ’Thatcherism’ as a transformative political project; and his support for the visual arts, culture, and politics of diaspora people around the world. 

In 2018, Hall’s papers were deposited at the Cadbury Research Library, University of Birmingham, and since 2023, the Stuart Hall Archive Project has sought to foster research activity and public engagement with Hall’s life, work and legacy. This lecture will provide an overview of the archive, a reflection on some of Hall’s key concepts of ‘conjuncture’, ‘hegemony’, and ’translation’, and a provocation to consider how we might respond to Hall’s political praxis today.

Speaker

Nick Beech is Associate Professor in the School of Social Policy and Society, University of Birmingham. He worked for Stuart Hall between 2011 and 2014 and prepared Hall’s archive for deposit at the Cadbury Research Library in 2017. He is a lead researcher on the Stuart Hall Archive Project, and a Trustee of the Stuart Hall Foundation. He completed his MSc, Architectural History at the Bartlett, UCL in 2006. 

How to join

In-person at room 106, Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PP

A World within a World: Drawing Architecture for Global Audience

About

The act of drawing is an unusual element within historical studies, a field traditionally sustained through writing and written texts. For architects, however, this seemingly unconventional approach has, over the past two centuries, become an essential mode of learning. Architectural drawings of historical buildings have also functioned as repositories of knowledge, allowing both architects and enthusiasts to engage with history through visual interpretation. 

The talk examines the zenith of this practice during the early twentieth century when the cataclysms of the two World Wars intensified the need to document buildings visually.  The talk will demonstrate that the depiction of architecture as historical narration functions both as a vehicle of translation and as a catalyst for the Post-World War II’s re-emergence of global architectural history.

Speaker

Vimalin Rujivacharakul (PhD, UC Berkeley) is Associate Professor of Art History and a Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture of Tsinghua University in Beijing, China. Her research and publications examine the intersections of architecture, intellectual history, history of collecting, and theories of things and material culture (Collecting China, Liang Sicheng and the Temple of the Buddha’s Light, Architecturalized Asia). Her latest work includes Asian Aesthetics and America, a two-volume special issue of Winterthur Portfolio, co-edited with J. Ritchie Garrison, and the forthcoming anthology on Vernacular Architecture and Orientalism with Deyin Luo. She has organised several exhibitions and inter-institutional and international research collaborations, including the 2022 symposium on Afghanistan with SAH and SAHGB, the 2024 International conference on Afghanistan and Archaeology sponsored by the Japan Foundation for the Promotion of Sciences. She has served on the Board of the Society for Architectural Historians and has also been the Director of the Curatorial Track Ph.D. Program in Art History and Director of the Asian studies program at the University of Delaware.  She is active in heritage preservation in Asia and currently works with her colleagues in China to study connections between local communities and UNESCO sites.

How to join

In-person at room 106, Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PP

Homes on the Thermal Frontier: Settler Colonialism and the Thermopolitics of the Tropical House

About

In tropical architecture, climate is often treated as a neutral technical challenge. Yet this framing can mask deeper political and cultural tensions about who is made comfortable - and why.  In this talk, Daniel Ryan explores how, in the first half of the twentieth century, the domestic lives of white women in tropical Australia became the focus of medical, political, and architectural intervention, as part of broader efforts to secure a racially exclusive settler nation. 

Drawing on medical texts, newspaper articles and voluntary organisations’ records, this talk considers alternative sources for architectural history. It shows how housework became a subject of thermal concern and physiological scrutiny, linking domestic labour to broader biopolitical agendas. Medical experts and women’s organisations enlisted architects to develop model houses for tropical servant-less living. Though few were built and most attempts ended in failure, the committee work and competitions had a lasting impact; a physiological agenda entered architecture, and remote tropical design became a testing ground for civilizing visions of settler permanence. 

Speaker

Daniel Ryan is a Senior Lecturer at the Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, The University of Sydney. His research examines the environmental history of architecture and the transfer of knowledge between medicine, architecture and social organisations concerning climate and building design in the twentieth century. 

How to join

In-person at room 106, Gordon House, 29 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PP