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Institute
In the first half of the 20th century, when architecture and literature dreamed of transparency, glass was the material these dreams were made of. However, the historiography of both fields usually focuses on a few canonical works by male authors to tell the story of this shared fascination. Departing from this imbalance, this essay takes the opportunity to explore the glass culture of modernity through the lens of female projects whose stories often take place simultaneously on different continents. While the former silent film actor Evelyn Word Leigh builds a glass house for herself in Nyack, New York, artists and writers based in Europe – like Claude Cahun, Anaïs Nin, and Hilda 'H.D.' Doolittle – flesh out imaginary glass domes as construction sites of artistic subjectivities. Whether homes or domes, these creative women used glass environments to question and renegotiate their assigned places in Western societies, challenging the boundaries of female agency.
Siegfried Kracauer’s texts are a widely investigated field of sociology and media studies. It is less well known that Kracauer was a graduate architect, practised during World War I and was awarded his PhD after writing a thesis in 1915 in the field of architectural history. After the war, Kracauer published numerous critiques with a special focus on the architectural developments of the time. They document an interest in architectural phenomena ranging from a reflection on his own experiences to a general perspective on the subjectivity of the modern architect, as well as more universal social phenomena.
In essence, this essay claims that the lack of ornamentation in modern architecture can be grasped as an ornamental concept of the new social order of capitalism.
The article presents a list of the Byzantine churches founded by the emperors of the Theodosian dynasty. The list of entries is accompanied by a historical commentary, bibliographical information and photographic evidence of the surviving sites. The bibliographies provide updated references for the history of the buildings and other issues such as the reliability of the sources and locations of the foundations. This list is based mainly on R. Janin’s work, Les églises et monastères de Constantinople byzantine (Paris, 1953, 1969).
Sublimity, negativity, and architecture. An essay on negative architecture through Kant to Adorno
(2015)
Architecture defines and consumes people. It exposes them to a multitude of varieties of different aesthetic engagements. Architecture becomes a lived experience. However, this lived experience is always caught in the inner workings of the social and more specifically within cultural ideology. In modern capitalism, culture pervades every aspect of our lives. It shows its presence everywhere from our own homes to the public streets. Culture is everywhere, and architecture is a tool used for both the benefit and detriment of the “culture industry”. Kant speaks of the sublime as a profound moment of reason realizing its ability to overcome its own limits. In this experience is it possible to be completely ravaged and descend into hades and melancholy? Is there a beauty in this descent? More specifically, can architecture become banal or pedestrian, uplifting or depressing? According to Theodor Adorno, our subjectivity is defined by the constant dialectical struggle between freedom and unfreedom (among other things). It is realizing our freedom in the face of our unfreedom that makes us truly able to attain some form of resistance. The sublime experience can be transformed into a spirit of revelation and beautifully allow us to in a way resist the one-dimensional tendencies of modern capitalism. Architecture, which is immersed in our societal being and contributes to many of our own subjective unfreedoms, comes to define our lives as inhabited space. When does architecture produce a sublime experience? Can architecture’s authentic “aura” stand out amongst the reproduced city and produce a sublime feeling that can be a form of resistance against the culture industry? Does Grand Central Terminal provide the key to an architecturally sublime experience? Using dialectical experience and examining the sublime feeling (in a critique of the Kantian sublime) as the key to breaking through the culture industry’s banal architectural hold on our subjectivity, this essay will examine the experience of the sublime as a key to unfolding resistance in the face of the banality of modern architecture in the city and opening our minds to the Great Refusal through the exploration of Grand Central Terminal.
Built to colonize
(2019)
There is a broad consensus that psychoanalytic theory cannot offer an account to further engage with the ontological turn toward the object that human sciences face today. In particular, the structuralist side of psychoanalysis, most prominently promoted by Jacques Lacan, is supposed to be unable to grasp an object independently from the subject. Against this background, it is no surprise that ‘object-oriented’ geographers ignore psychoanalytic theory. My aim is to investigate the interstices between the object-oriented turn and Lacanian psychoanalysis. I argue that the critiques miss a crucial aspect of Lacan’s ontology: he does not question that there are objects located ‘out there’, but rather adds that psychoanalysis engages with another object whose location remains uncertain. I follow Lacan’s most important invention, the object a, to argue that this object is crucial to understanding the ontology of Lacan as an ‘object-disoriented’ ontology. While object-oriented approaches in cultural geography give ontological priority to the material conditions of existence, Lacanian ontology allows us to understand how material objects become spectralized through an immaterial surplus. To substantiate this claim, I explore the role of anxiety with regard to the Sathorn Unique Tower, an abandoned skyscraper sitting in the middle of Bangkok. Widely known as the ‘Ghost Tower’, this ruin is internationally considered to be haunted. By focusing on a movie and an interview about the Ghost Tower as well as my own ethnographic observation of it, I not only explore the topological dimension of the ghost but also demonstrate that it is precisely the impossibility of localization that enables an object to disorientate the subject.
This article deals with the history of the Bauhaus Colloquium held every three years at the Bauhaus University of Weimar. Specifically, it discusses the context of the first two Colloquia of 1976 and 1979. Today, The International Bauhaus Colloquium held at the Bauhaus University of Weimar is the most renowned conference on the theory and history of architecture in the German-speaking realm. In the past decades the Colloquium has gained a reputation as a place where hot topics are discussed, such as the place of architecture in a world of global and diffused power (2009) or the close relationship between architecture and media (2007). Freedom of expression and critical exchange seems a natural given in such a context. However, the origins of the Colloquium are to be found in quite a different setting. The first Colloquium was organised in 1976, during the years of the GDR regime in Eastern Germany. It was an outcome of the debate by the side of scholars, architects and the Socialist Unity Party, what to do with the Bauhaus heritage. In this way, the history of the Bauhaus colloquia reflects the larger history of GDR cultural politics. It also reflects the intellectual history of architectural modernism in Communist countries as a theme about which we have limited knowledge today. Finally, as the colloquia were meeting points for the European Left involved in architectural modernist studies, it also exemplifies the history of left wing scholars in confrontation with the Left on the other side of the Wall.
How critical is criticality?
(2011)
With Architecture Since 1400 another volume has been added to the list of authoritative surveys of architectural history published in recent years. With 30 bit-like chapters and some 300 illustrations, this book is an ambitious attempt to write a global history of architecture that focuses on the arrival of modernity. The central idea of this survey is the shift away from the Weberian approach that views modernization as emanating from the West. Instead, in this book modern architecture is rewritten according to a global approach that allows for multiple perspectives in a multipolar world. This decentring approach is also pivotal for other parts of the book. For example, there is the much-needed effort to include women in the canon. In addition, the author exchanges a stylistic history for a social history and combines this with a narrative that maps the agents of the built environment, thus complementing the narrative of the genius-architect with that of the role played by clients, patrons and critics. In this way, Lina Bo Bardi or Zaha Hadid not only take their place next to Le Corbusier or Brunelleschi, but in addition Eleanor of Toledo is mentioned as an influential sixteenth-century ruler next to her husband Cosimo I, and Hardwick Hall in England is now considered the outcome of the cooperation between the architect Robert Smythson and the landowner Bess of Hardwick.