Michal Murawski - Situating Architecture Lecture Series
31 October 2016, 6:30 pm–7:30 pm

Event Information
Open to
- All
Location
-
Room 206, 140 Hampstead Road, London NW1 2BX
Late Putinist Hellenism? Zombie Monumentality, from Palmyra to Moscow
What room is there for grand monuments, ancient ruins and
triumphal arches in the architectural 21st century? And what does the
current explosion of global fascination with the ruins of ancient
Palmyra - following their re-ruination by ISIS and recapture by the
Russian-backed Syrian army - tell us about contemporary attitudes to
monumentality? This talk is pivoted around Palmyra, but digresses into
London, Moscow, Warsaw and elsewhere. It explores some ways in which
new, old, disavowed and undead forms of monumentality continue to hold
sway over the political-aesthetic imaginations of the post-monumental
world.
Michał Murawski is an anthropologist of
architecture and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at the
Department of Russian, Queen Mary, University of London. He was
previously Mellon Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the School of
Slavonic and East European Studies, UCL, and completed his PhD in Social
Anthropology at the University of Cambridge in 2014. He is currently
completing his book manuscript, Palace Complex: The Social Life of a
Stalinist Skyscraper in Capitalist Warsaw, under contract with Indiana
University Press. His new project focuses on architectural aesthetics
and municipal politics in Putin-era Moscow.
Situating Architecture lectures are free and open to members of the public on a first come, first seated basis.