In November 2018 The Bartlett School of Architecture held a groundbreaking international conference on ‘A World of Architectural History’, organised by Professor Murray Fraser. The school has now collated an archive of filmed lectures from the conference, which are all available to watch online. 

The conference set out to critique and celebrate the latest global advances within architectural history over the last few decades, by focusing upon the word 'global' in two senses:

  • Geographically - referring to the increasing inclusion of all parts of the world in more complex and multiple discourses of architectural history
  • Intellectually - the ongoing expansion of architectural history into other academic subjects, plus the reception of ideas/themes from those subjects

Recognition was therefore given to more inclusive approaches to architectural history, which seek to incorporate the histories of all countries/regions, as well as to the significant contributions being made through interdisciplinary links with other subjects.

While these twenty lectures do not represent all of the material from the conference, collectively they give a comprehensive sense of the range of topics and issues discussed. Never before have so many internationally leading speakers from the field of architectural history been available together online in this way, along with subtitles for ease of viewing/listening.  

Explore the video archive

1. Eliana Abuhamdi Murchie (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
The New Global: Architectural history education and the ethics of millennial citizenship 

2. Pier Vittorio Aureli (Architectural Association, UK)
Labour, Architecture, and the Problem of History

3. Sibel Bozdogan (Boston University, USA)
Re-Conceptualizing the ‘Regional’ in Global Histories of Modern Architecture

4. Alex Bremner (Edinburgh University, UK)
Blue, Green and Grey: Toward a new history of architecture, infrastructure and empire

5. Petra Brouwer (University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands)
Books, Buildings and Boundaries: A nineteenth-century perspective on the writing of World Architectural History

6. Philip Goad + Alan Pert (Melbourne University, Australia)
Activating the Archive: Curating architectural history

7. Carola Hein (TU Delft, The Netherlands) 
The Architecture of Oil

8. Hilde Heynen (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Victor and Eva Klemperer: Tragic domesticities in Nazi Germany

9. Mark Jarzombek (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)
The Global and the Incomplete

10. Johan Lagae (Ghent University, Belgium)
The Territory and the Network: Towards a transnational and trans-local architectural history of the former Belgian Congo, 1880–1960

11. David Leatherbarrow (University of Pennsylvania, USA)
God is in the Detail: On evidence and imagination

12. Andong Lu (Nanjing University, China)
Responsive Experimentalism: A history of design research in contemporary Chinese architecture over the past quarter-century

13. Yongyi Lu (Tongji University, China)
Building an Alternative Modern: On the history of early modern architecture in Shanghai

14. Ikem Stanley Okoye (University of Delaware, USA)
Circa 1912: Africa’s New Way Architecture (NWA)

15. Ken Tadashi Oshima (University of Washington, USA)
The Architecture of Japan in a Global Context

16. Vikram Prakash (University of Washington, USA)
Diffractive Modernism: New Materialism and Global History

17. Vimalin Rujivacharakul (University of Delaware, USA)
The Alpha and Interwar Europe: World architectural history at the end of empire

18. Yifan Wang + Jie Zhang (Tsinghua University, China)
Re-Placing Genius Loci: An alternative model of architectural anthropology in Quanzhou

19. Alice Tseng (Boston University, USA)
Writing Japan into Architectural History: Looking in and looking out

20. Charlie Xue (City University of Hong Kong, China)
Modern Chinese Architecture in the Developing World

More information

Image: Scene from 'Tale of Genji in Fifty-four Chapters' as drawn by Hiroshige in 1852 [Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons]