We are very pleased to announce that ASSC will be hosting Milos Kosec as Honorary Research Associate this year.

Milos will be working on a project titled ‘Barriers without walls: Spatialisation of the cordon sanitaire’, and there will be an associated research event in the spring 2021.

Anne-Françoise Morel is assistant professor in History of Architecture at KU Leuven, Department of Architecture. Her main research interest focuses on the church architecture of Stuart England. She also works on architecture as a tool of cultural diplomacy. In 2019 her first monograph Glorious Temples or Babylonic Whores: the Culture of Church Building in Stuart England through the Lens of Consecration Sermons was published by Brill.

Claire Zimmerman teaches architectural history at the University of Michigan. At Birkbeck she will be researching a book that details the transformations in twentieth-century architecture prompted by large scale industrialization, the production of internal combustion engines and other machines, the mobility thereby made possible in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the consequences of all three for architecture today.

Seminars are held at 5pm in The Keynes Library, Birkbeck School of Arts, 43, Gordon Sq., London, WC1H OPD. A break at 5.50pm is followed by discussion and refreshments.

13 November: Zoe Opacic of ASSC: From Sacroscape to Cityscape: Images of Central European Towns in Late Medieval Sources

For more information please look here.

Environmental Futures: Architecture & Green Technologies in the Lithium Triangle

October 19, 2017, Kensington Darwin Building, Room D612, 6th Floor, from 16:00 to 20:00

In a context of transition from fossil fuels to “clean” energy the MA Environmental Architecture programme at the Royal College of Art announces a four-year research project on the environmental consequences of lithium extraction. The research will focus on Chile, Argentina and Bolivia – an area also known as the “lithium triangle”, and will be developed in collaboration with local research partners including advocacy teams and indigenous organisations.

For more information look here.

The launch of the Home series, edited by Rosie Cox and Victor Büchli

Wednesday 24 May 2017, 6pm, Keynes Library, Birkbeck

To register click here.

The exciting new series responds to the growing interest in the home as an area of research and teaching.  Highly interdisciplinary, titles feature contributions from across the social sciences, including anthropology, material culture studies, architecture and design, sociology, gender studies, migration studies, and environmental studies.  Relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers, the series will consolidate the home as a field of study. The series will launch with the publication of Sexuality and Gender at Home, Making Homes, and Food, Masculinities and Home.

Future Passé

Friday 2 June 2017, 10-5:30pm, Victoria & Albert Museum, Lydia and Manfred Gorvy Lecture Theatre 

Keynote: Filmmaker Peter Greenaway

Main speakers: Historian of Technology David Edgerton, Architectural Historian Barbara Penner, Geographer Gillian Rose, Architect Liam Young

How do we represent urban change and technological development in visual and textual form, historically and in the present? How has visual rhetoric been used to normalize the disruption and destruction that accompanies modern ideas of ‘progress’? And what happens when these confident predictions of future relevance fail and we are left with dead-ends and obsolete technologies, the unwanted remains of modernity?

Join academic speakers, V&A curators, artists and filmmakers as they aim to unpick how narratives of progress have been – and continue to be – established through visual and textual representations of urban change and technological development. What ends do these narratives serve? How can they be unpicked and re-presented?

The event is free, but online booking required: https://www.vam.ac.uk/event/Mo7OM4o5/future-passe

Fantasy in Reality: Architecture, Representation, Reproduction

This symposium aims to consider the intersection of fantasy and reality by examining a broad range of architectural production from the Renaissance to the present day across different cultures and media. It includes papers that explore the blurred lines, or tensions, between fantasy and reality in architecture and its representation. Architectural fantasies created in drawings, paintings, computer renders, photographs and films, and three dimensional examples in built projects, exhibition pavilions, doll houses, interiors and garden features will be considered as vital forms of architectural production that both reflect and produce reality.

How does the production of architectural fantasies relate to reality and attempt to shape it? How do representations of architecture construct or perpetuate fantasies of the built environment? How have architects, city planners and/or politicians and rulers used architecture to reinforce fantastical notions of reality? What is the role of the mass media in the production and dissemination of architectural fantasies in popular culture?

In what ways do representations of built or soon to be built projects contribute to the construction of fantasy? The conference seeks to address these questions and more.

For programme and registration please have a look here.

URBAN CHANGE – Current Research in Film, Television And Media Studies

BIMI-PITT Research Workshop 10-12 May 2017, 43 Gordon Square

The first edition, “Cinema and the City”, May 2015, was a productive and enjoyable occasion, which has already generated several joint research initiatives, including journal publications, student and staff exchanges, public lectures, curatorial projects, and study days.

The forthcoming edition, entitled “Urban Change”, pursues the broad theme of cinema and the city, while addressing more precisely how moving image culture – in all its changing forms and formats, both aesthetically and technologically speaking – has responded and continues to react to the ongoing economic, social and political transformation of urban environments. These environments are understood as physical spaces but also as places to live, work, love and play, both individually and in terms of interpersonal and community relationships. While the cities of Pittsburgh and London remain significant topics for exploration, the geographical and historical coordinates of this workshop are entirely open, and participants will be exploring urban contexts and examples drawn from France, Algeria, Canada, India, Russia, Japan, Hong Kong, Denmark and Sweden.

Please book your places and have a look at the programmehere.

Research Seminar open to all: “Thresholds: seeing the past through the future”

Pete James & Mat Collishaw (History and Theory of Photography Research Centre & Vasari Research Centre)

5^th May, 6.00. Room B04, 43 Gordon Square

In 1839 WHF Talbot exhibited an extensive selection of his new photogenic drawings at the Birmingham meeting of the Association for the Advancement for Science. In a time of disturbance, this important event took place in King Edward’s School on New Street, a major work of Neo-Gothic architecture by Charles Barry, which was demolished in the 1930s.

Pete James (former Curator of Photography Collections at Birmingham Library) and acclaimed artist Mat Collishaw will talk about their innovative research project that recreates the exhibition and space as a Virtual Environment.

Their exhibition Thresholds opens in London on May 17^th.

Architecture, Citizenship, Space: British Architecture from the 1920s to the 1970s

10:30, Thursday, 15 June 2017 to 13:00, Friday, 16 June 2017

How did individuals and groups concerned with architecture and the built environment in Britain respond to, and seek to shape, the challenges and opportunities of twentieth-century life? Engaging with themes such as democracy, citizenship, leisure, culture and new subjectivities, and showcasing scholars at the forefront of emerging methodological approaches to architectural history, this conference considers how key aspects of British modernity informed architectural form and space between the 1920s and the 1970s.

The conference, which is supported by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and convened by Elizabeth Darling and Alistair Fair, takes place at the Headington Campus of Oxford Brookes University. The conference fee is £30, and includes lunch and refreshments. Any queries should be addressed to Elizabeth Darling (edarling@brookes.ac.uk)

Bartlett Sound Making Space Doctoral Network 2017, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

Sound physically responds to space. Sound waves interact with solid structures and pass through living bodies, defining the spatial parameters of our built environment, and revealing otherwise hidden dimensions of architecture through echo and reverberation. Equally, the ways that architecture is used to frame the human voice and urban rhythms, as well as music, influences the mood or temperament of the spaces we inhabit, and has shaped contemporary modes of listening.

Bringing together practitioners that engage with space through sound, the Sound Making Space Seminar Series aims to explore how the making of sound and music open up new ways of thinking about architecture.

Crossing Borders: Negotiation, Provocation, and Transgression

Graduate Conference, Birkbeck, University of London, 5-6th May 2017

This conference is a call to intellectual arms, then, a provocation to think geographical, political, bodily, technological, and environment borders. What constitutes a border, how are they stabilised, and how can they be crossed, negotiated or transgressed? How are borders enacted, defined and re-defined by surveillance, technology, regulations and resistance? Are borders necessarily the logic of a colonial structure of thought, predicated on capture, division, and domination? How else might difference be thought and engaged? What is the discourse, language, imagery of the border? How are human bodies reciprocally shaped by the social environment? What model of the psyche can help us understand the rich diversity of socio-political mechanisms? How can we cross the border of rationality in order to explore and release the unconscious factors in our sense-making? And, crucially, how can we as academics cross institutional and disciplinary borders? We welcome submissions from across the Humanities and Social Sciences, and especially encourage contributions from artists and activists. For more information please visit here.

CHASE workshop 24 February 2017: Medieval and Early Modern Spaces and Places

Drawing upon the research interests of the Medieval and Early Modern Research Group at the Open University and the Architecture Space and Society Centre at Birkbeck, we will be hosting a workshop on spaces and places on Friday 24 February 2017. The workshop will examine life in buildings, institutions and broader geographical areas from a variety of perspectives and will consider the following questions:

–       How were medieval and early modern spaces adapted and transformed through the movement of material and immaterial things?

–       To what extent did a sense of place depend upon the activities taking place there?

We are in the initial stages of planning the event, which is open to academics based in CHASE institutions. Unfortunately, CHASE network funding for non-student events is not available this year, but Birkbeck has kindly offered a space in London for the event and we plan to apply to the Open University for some funding to cover catering. We would like to build upon the CHASE event that Birkbeck hosted in April 2016  (‘The Matter of the Archive’) and to continue an annual dialogue between academics based at CHASE universities.

We welcome expressions of interest from scholars across disciplines who would like to contribute to the workshop. If you would like to attend, please e-mail Leah Clark (leah.clark@open.ac.uk) and Helen Coffey (Helen.coffey@open.ac.uk) by 9 January 2017. If you would like to present a paper please provide us with a working title.

Timescapes of Urban Change: Barcelona and London – a regeneration comparison , 29^th of November at 18:30 at UCL- Harrie Massey Lecture Theatre.

Focusing on two cities that are exemplar for their urban regeneration, London and Barcelona, this panel discussion will bring together urban professionals and academics to discuss and reflect from a long term perspective on the regeneration of these respective cities.

Speakers: Simone Abram (Durham University), Bob Allies (Allies and Morrison Architects), Monica Degen (Brunel University), Mari Paz Balibrea (Birbeck), Carme Gual Via (Barcelona City Council), Euan Mills (Future Cities Catapult), Mike Raco (UCL).

Book here

Lecture: ‘From Avant-Garde to Architecture (and Back)’by  Professor Tyrus Miller, University of California-Santa Cruz

21st November, 6.00-8.00pm, School of Advanced Study, University of London

Senate House, Malet Street, Room 246. Please book a place by contacting the Seminar Convenor Dr Angeliki Spiropoulou at  angeliki.spiropoulou@sas.ac.uk

The European Architectural Historians Network is asking for session proposals for its conference in Tallinn, Estonia, in June 2018.  ASSC member Mark Crinson is on EAHN’s scientific committee. Please look at their website http://eahn2018conference.ee for more information.

History of Art at Birkbeck announces headline appointments in the history of architecture and photography

In collaboration with BFI and University of Pittsburgh, and in conjunction with the London Festival of Architecture

Jun 11 10:30 – 17:30, Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square, WC1H 0PD

This event explores and expands upon the Broadcasting the Arts: Architecture on TV season, ongoing throughout June at the BFI Southbank. Co-curators Matt Harle (Birkbeck, BFI) and Kevin M. Flanagan (University of Pittsburgh) will discuss the genesis of the project, the process of planning and organization, and will introduce the larger intellectual aims of the series. The day’s events will consist of screenings of material that will not be shown at the BFI event, papers relating to architecture on British television, and discussion.