Chairs and Contact Details:
Sofia Nannini, Politecnico di Torino
Víctor Muñoz Sanz, TU Delft
Elene Vernaeve, Ghent University
Disrupting infrastructures: The role of environmental actors in constructing the cattle industry in twentieth century Katanga, Belgian Congo
Dalal Musaed Alsayer, Kuwait University
"The Chicken of Tomorrow" and the Farm of the World
Antonio Giráldez López, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela
Holstein cows on synthetic meadows. Spatial analysis of domestic-productive units for livestock farming developed by the Instituto Nacional de Colonización in A Chaira (Galicia, Spain), 1956-1975
Christina Katharina May, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg Anthropogeographie
High-rise Pigs and Poultry Mines – Architecture between progress and improvisation in the GDR's intensive animal production industry
Priyanka Sen, Cornell University
Milking the Cow: Dairy Production in Postcolonial India
Animal based products are everywhere: on our supermarket shelves, in our skincare routines, or in the shoes we wear. Yet the scale and quality of the places where those products come from are far from our collective imagination or set in some form of idealized countryside. Industrial livestock farming is a pervasive planetary phenomenon. Scientists warn us that factory farming crucially contributes to the climate emergency: the breath and flatulence of cows warm the planet; monocultures of animal feed crops drive deforestation, biodiversity loss, and challenge the livelihoods of many; overcrowding increases zoonotic risks to human and non-human health. At the same time, in Europe and beyond, farmers are protesting in defense of what they consider their culture and mission to feed the world.
Caught in the middle, the lives and deaths of billions of non-human animals annually continue occurring in buildings which are little known, if not wholly invisible. Somehow, the history of these buildings, with their layouts and technologies, is also opaque and often disregarded by architectural historiography, with a few exceptions (Garric 2014; Alsayer 2021). Conversely, since Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command (1948), many studies have focused on the architectural, urban, and social history of the slaughterhouse and of the packing industry (Cronon 1991; Vialles 1994; Young Lee 2008; Pachirat 2013; Pacyga 2015).
From sixteenth-century Palladian villas to today’s concentrated feeding operations, Western architecture has evolved along the entanglements between humans and domesticated animals – mostly cattle, pigs, poultry, and horses. How do we conceptualize an architecture of animal farming – when we are dealing with a blend of technologies, animal bodies, ideal abstractions, and dirty realities? The architectural history of intensive animal farming is scattered among different geographies, actors, and institutions – and it is often a history without architects. Who has designed these spaces since the industrial revolution – architects, engineers, veterinary doctors, agrarian experts, or also the animals themselves? Which zootechnical elements or typologies date back to pre-industrial times and attest to a longue durée of rural and farming practices? What was the architectural impact of the animal welfare debate, sparked in the 1960s with the publication of Animal Machines by Ruth Harrison (1964)?
While animal farming and its environmental impact has been the object of attention in anthropology, geography, STS, environmental humanities, and the arts, investigating this architecture and its paradoxical and multifaceted global histories is now more urgent than ever (Schrepfer & Scranton 2004; Blanchette 2020; Piazzesi 2023; Wadiwel 2023). This session welcomes case studies on the architectural history of animal farming at a global scale, with a preference for papers that present original archival investigations and that shed light on the industrialization of rural practices that occurred in the past three centuries. Key questions we would like to address in this session include, but are not limited to: what are the models, technologies, building materials that most contributed to the industrialization of animal agriculture? What have been the key institutions, companies, professional figures, and geographies in this history? To what extent have farming practices been technologies and instruments of Western colonialism (Fischer 2015; Specht 2019)? How have societal and cultural ideas on ‘the animal’ and welfare influenced the architecture of industrialized farming? What has been the role of human and non-human labor in the spatialization of factory farming?
With this session we aim at increasing our knowledge and awareness on animal farming, in order to promote a deeper understanding of the Anthropocene and its alternative definitions – most notably, the Thanatocene, or the era of massive global death (Bonneuil/Fressoz 2016). If the future is closely dependent on our capacity of historical analysis, research into the history of industrial farming may suggest new modes of positive and responsible coexistence and allow the architecture discipline to participate in the search for more livable other worlds.
Selected Literature
Alsayer, Dalal Musaed. 2021. “Chicken of Tomorrow and Farm of Today: The Chicken, the Farm, and the Greenhouse.” In On Foraging: Food Knowledge and Environmental Imaginaries in the UAE’s Landscape, edited by Faysal Tabbarah, Dima Srouji, and Meitha Almazrooei, 48–59. Abu Dhabi, UAE: Warehouse 421.
Blanchette, Alex. 2020. Porkopolis: American Animality, Standardized Life, and the Factory Farm. Durham: Duke University Press.
Bonneuil, Christophe, and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz. 2016. The Shock of the Anthropocene. London/New York: Verso.
Cronon, William. 1991. Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton.
Fischer, John Ryan. 2015. Cattle Colonialism: An Environmental History of the Conquest of California and Hawai'i. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Garric, Jean-Philippe. 2014. Vers une agritecture: Architecture des constructions agricoles (1789-1950). Bruxelles: Mardaga.
Pachirat, Timothy. 2013. Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight. New Haven/London: Yale University Press.
Pacyga, Dominic A. 2015. Slaughterhouse: Chicago's Union Stock Yard and the World It Made. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
Piazzesi, Benedetta. 2023. Del governo degli animali. Allevamento e biopolitica. Macerata: Quodlibet Studio.
Schrepfer, Susan R., and Philip Scranton, eds. 2004. Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History. New York/London: Routledge.
Specht, Joshua. 2019. Red Meat Republic: A Hoof-to-Table History of How Beef Changed America. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Vialles, Noilie. 1994. Animal to Edible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wadiwel, Dinesh Joseph. 2023. Animals and Capital. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Young Lee, Paula. 2008. Meat, Modernity and the Rise of the Slaughterhouse. University of New Hampshire Press.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Katrin Albrecht, Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences
Lisa Henicz, Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences
Angela Gigliotti, Eastern Switzerland University of Applied Sciences
Luis Miguel Lus Arana, Universidad de Zaragoza
This Aerial Life: On the Role of Popular Culture Images in the Spatial Reconceptualization of the City, 1880-1930
Giulia Boller, ETH Zurich
The Flying Foremen: How Computers, Soldiers, and Cameras Built the Munich Olympic Roofs
Simon Rabyniuk, TU Eindhoven, University of Toronto
Counter-Constructions: Rotterdam and Sabena Passenger Helicopter Network, 1953-1966
Maryia Rusak, KIT - Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Fields of Vision: Norwegian Photogrammetry Projects in East Africa
Hilary Huckins-Weidner, University of Michigan
EROS Center: U.S. Architectures of Aerial Data and Ecological Control
The conquest of the air by balloons, kites, dirigibles and controlled powered flight at the threshold of the 20th century and the discovery of the air as a new element for movement and communication have profoundly transformed our way of perceiving, thinking and practicing space. New airborne technologies and visual media such as aerial photography, satellite imagery and drone vision have since become powerful means for surveying, representing, planning and designing architecture, cities, infrastructures and landscapes.
The gaining of a new vision indicated a revolutionary shift in design practice and theory, even if first balloon surveying attempts were doubted to ‘ever be found practical and prove of more than theoret-ical interest’ (E. Deville 1895). However, whereas air views could show the ‘beauties and defects’ (P. Abercrombie 1919) of the fast-growing historical cities by revealing a ‘new urban façade and perspective never before known’ (J. L. Sert 1942), they would soon equally facilitate planning in remote, yet unmapped and seemingly uninhabited regions by enabling rapid data collection containing a striking ‘abundance of details’ (R. Danger 1933) and by providing efficient tools for exploring and conquering new territories. Beyond the technical, analytical and documentary value of aerial means for planning and research, the changing perception and experience of spaces and bodies were assumed to also impact the overall ‘sensing of gravity, dimension, density and quantity’ (P. Zucker 1929), and, consequently, to ‘enlighten and expand the spirit’ (Le Corbusier 1942) of all architectural and urban projects.
Given the interdependence between spatial perception, representation and design, the session aims to investigate the impact of the “aerial” on concrete architectural and urban design practices in the 19th and 20th century by focusing on key projects, places, figures, networks, documents and procedures that address issues such as urban patterns and developments, high- and low-rise construction, techno-colonial endeavours, aerial threat and scientific missions. The session seeks to explore the possibilities and intentions associated with new aerial means, ranging from the conditions of production, dissemination and reception of aerial imagery to its use and relevance for planning, design and theory formation and its function as visual, informational, representational and design means. It thereby intends to question technically and culturally conditioned approaches to architecture, the limits of spatial and morphological perception and representation, and the relevance of scale and distance required for design, particularly in relation to human scale.
Contributions on physical-material expressions of space, its formal treatment as well as its intrinsic conception are welcome. Papers may, for instance, discuss methods and practices of modern urban design and architecture; ideas and ideological underpinnings of architecture, city and territory revealed by the aerial; material and structural aspects of works affected by the conquest of the third dimension; or medial, iconographic and instrumental characters of aerial imagery. Transdisciplinary, transoceanic and transcultural issues related to architectural histories and practices are particularly encouraged.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Laura Hindelang, University of Bern
Anne Hultzsch, ETH Zurich
Stella Nair, University of California Los Angeles
Inca Women Drinking: Painted Vessels and Spaces for Female Authority in the Early Modern Andes
Panagiotis Doudesis, University of Cambridge Alumnus
Roasting Beans and Sipping Hot Spiced Concoctions: The Case of the Chocolate Kitchens and the Royal Apartments of Hampton Court in the Late Seventeenth Century
Anna Myjak-Pycia, ETH Zurich
From Multisensory Experience to the Museum Display of Glory Days: The Peregrination of a Teacup from China, through the Ottoman Empire, Vienna, to the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
Carina-Nathalia Madonna Visconti-Paff, Sapienza Università di Roma
Materiality of Colonial Resistance: Engraved Cacao (Molds) and Spatial Practice in 18th-Century Mexican Convents
Stella Rossikopoulou Pappa, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sweet Surfaces: Colored Sugar, Porcelain Imagery, and the Architecture of Colonial Consumption
This session brings together three phenomena: ceramics featuring architectural motifs; the consumption of stimulants – from tea, coffee, and chocolate to sugar and a brewed corn drink – which played a significant role in colonial trade and imperial networks; as well as their spatial environments. Through this specific group of objects of consumption and the built spaces in which they were used, thus bridging material and visual cultures, we seek to tell architectural histories of global colonial entanglements and distinct spatial practices before ca. 1900. Already in the Inca Empire, the consumption of a corn drink (agha) served imperial practices; European elites from the 16th century onwards began to define themselves through the consumption of exclusive substances - often as hot beverages - that contained an intrinsic trace of increasing global integration. The vessels in which these were consumed link bodily ingestion with both representative and productive spaces. Taking these highly potent objects and environments as prisms, this session complicates early modern architectural historiographies.
The papers in this session explore questions such as: What kind of sceneries were displayed on architectural ceramics? To what extent did these real or imagined spaces relate to the physical spaces of both the production and consumption of hot beverages and addictive edibles, including plantations and coffee or tea houses? How can we conceptualize the intimate bodily encounters with architectural porcelain, the processes of ingesting stimulating substances such as hot chocolate, tea, sugar, coffee, or agha? How can ceramics manifest a space or constitute a spatial practice within the global-colonial networks necessary to produce, trade, transport, and sell not only the beverages but also the vessels? Through these objects and their environments, how can we tell marginalized stories of exploitation, oppression, asymmetrical power relations, use, and abuse – but also of agency and resistance – in relation to architectural histories?
Chairs and Contact Details:
Elisa Boeri, Politecnico di Milano
Francesca Mattei, Università degli Studi Roma Tre
Mariapaola Michelotto, M.Sc. in Architecture (IUAV Venice, ETH Zurich)
The Domesticated Woman:Discipline and community at the Casa delle Zitelle Gasparine in Padova
Tara Bissett, University of Waterloo
The Archive of Obsession: Women’s Reformatories as Diagnostic Space
Meredith TenHoor, Pratt Institute
Relations not Models: Nicole Sonolet’s Hospitals for the ASM 13 in Paris
Ilaria Cattabriga (University of Bologna), Lorenzo Mingardi (University of Florence)
“Inside that High Wall”: Giovanni Michelucci and the Design of Places of Social Exclusion
Ana Tostões (IST Tecnico Lisboa), Michela Pilotti (Politecnico di Milano), Francesca Giudetti (Politecnico di Milano)
The Exposure of Psychiatrich Conditions in Italy Through the Media in the late 1960s
This session aims to critically and comparatively examine the evolution of the design and urban history of psychiatric care facilities, from the initial interventions involving the adaptation and transformation of existing structures (such as monasteries, prisons, etc.), to the systematic design of new buildings and urban systems, which began with the socio-political dynamics of the Enlightenment and continued into the contemporary era.
Since the Middle Ages, society has sought to isolate and conceal those considered "different" from established norms, a matter that has been addressed over time through various practices, both architectural and procedural. These range from the domestic care of madness to confinement aimed at managing public order issues; from the hospitals built in the Islamic world for the care of the sick (the Bimaristan), where the peacefulness of the place contributed to the treatment of the mind, to psychiatric institutions that have become political devices helping to control various forms of (political and civil) disobedience.
Architectural structures designed to confine "the other" do not always originate with this specific function. This is evident, for instance, in conventional buildings, which commonly also accommodated the indigent, pregnant women without families and chronic or psychiatric patients, thus highlighting the overlap between the concepts of 'confinement' and 'exclusion'.
In Western contexts, these spaces frequently emerge through the repurposing of buildings initially intended for other functions, as illustrated by Het Dolhuys in Haarlem, which began as a leper hospital and later became a lunatic asylum in the 16th century. On other occasions, their histories are far older, such as that of the Bethlem Royal Hospital in Bromley (London), founded in 1247, though subsequently relocated and transformed. These institutions are often situated on the periphery of cities, isolated and relegated to the margins, or otherwise located outside city walls - examples of which include Bethlem Royal Hospital itself, as well as the Hospital of San Vincenzo in Prato, Milan, one of the earliest asylums in Italy (second half of the 15th century).
Starting from the 17th century, and with greater emphasis between the 18th and 20th centuries, there was a systematic experimentation with the topic of asylum space and the moral rehabilitation of the mentally ill. This development occurred in parallel with shifts in European and non-European political and social landscapes, as well as advancements in medical and scientific studies (such as the emergence of occupational therapies like ergotherapy and the reformist movement led by Philippe Pinel, director of the Bicêtre in Paris). Consequently, there was a growing focus on the built environment dedicated to the treatment of mental illnesses. In the 19th century, the circulation of architectural models for asylums revolved around well-defined typologies, ranging from the radial model (e.g., the Devon County Pauper Lunatic Asylum in Exeter) to the widely adopted pavilion hospital layout (from the Norwich Pauper Asylum to the San Niccolò Asylum in Siena). In this context, architecture also began to play a role in classifying and separating various degrees of mental illness.
The papers in this session explore and analyse questions such as: how does the design of specialized institutions—ranging from early modern "houses" to postwar hospitals—mediate the tension between providing care and enforcing social or carceral control? In what ways have architects attempted to "de-carceralize" institutional spaces by prioritizing human relationships, nature, and the dissolution of physical boundaries? What role did media—including investigative journalism, photography, and film—play in exposing institutional violence and shifting the public perception of the asylum from a place of healing to one of punishment? How have specific institutions for women historically functioned as spaces for both the confinement of "irregular" individuals and the emergence of unexpected models of communal autonomy?
Selected Literature
Airoldi C., Crippa M.A., Doti G., Guardamagna L., Lenza C., Neri M.L., I complessi manicomiali in Italia tra Otto e Novecento, Milano: Electa, 2013 Birdsall, C., Parry, M., and Tkaczyk, V., Listening to the Mind, in “The Public Historian”, Vol. 37, No. 4 (November 2015), pp. 47-72.
Epicoco, G., Indagini sullo stato patrimoniale di un ospedale prima della riforma amministrativa quattrocentesca: San Vincenzo in Prato e il suo libro di conti (Milano, 1449), in “Studi di storia medioevale e di diplomatica”, Nuova Serie, (7), 2023, pp. 445–459 doi: 10.54103/2611-318X/20158.
Foucault M., Folie et déraison. Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique, Paris: Plon, 1961
Geltner, G., A Cell of Their Own: The Incarceration of Women in Late Medieval Italy, “Signs “, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 27-51 (monographic issue: Women, Gender, and Prison: National and Global Perspectives, Autumn 2013)
Goffman, E., Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books, 1961.
Hickman, C., The Picturesque at Brislington House, Bristol: The Role of Landscape in Relation to the Treatment of Mental Illness in the Early Nineteenth-Century Asylum, “Garden History”, Summer, 2005, Vol. 33, No. 1 (Summer, 2005), pp. 47-60.
Howayda, A., The Concept of Space in Mamluk Architecture, “Muqarnas”, 2001, Vol. 18 (2001), pp. 73-93.
Iaria, A. (ed.), L’ Ospedale psichiatrico di Roma: dal Manicomio Provinciale alla chiusura, 2003.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Christine Beese, Ruhr Universität Bochum
Lavinia Munteanu, Graz University of Technology
Utopian Cities and Knowledge Practices in the Early Modern Period
Sara D’Anna, Pompeu Fabra University Barcelona
Craft Guilds and the Urban Configuration of Early Modern Naples
Davide Martino, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Terraqueous cities: the early modern art of governing water
Jason Nguyem, John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design / University of Toronto
The Measure of Authority. Bodies, Buildings, and the Bureaucracy of Expertise in Early Modern Paris
When the Swedish natural scientist Olof Rudbeck embarked on a peregrinatio medica to the Netherlands in 1653, he not only became acquainted with the latest techniques and instruments of anatomical dissection. The site of Leiden University, a former beguine church, was also home to a maths school for future engineers who were to map, build and secure the young republic. After his return, Rudbeck was appointed professor of natural history at the Royal University of Uppsala, where he taught anatomy and botany as well as architecture. To promote technical skills, he soon set up a ‘mechanical house’, a workshop where craftsmen, land surveyors, and instrument makers were trained. On behalf of the crown, the city council, the university, the church, and individual citizens, Rudbeck and his students erected buildings, surveyed land, designed technical equipment, and improved the city’s sanitary infrastructure.
In his book series Atlantica, Rudbeck furthermore tried to scientifically prove that the Swedes were born with a special degree of technical ability that legitimised them as a hegemonic power. Based on archaeological findings, he attempted to identify Uppsala as the former capital of the lost Atlantis. In this way the city was supposed to embody a model of society that was considered natural. Both the architectural form and the mythological narratives that characterise the image of the city of Uppsala in the 17th century thus originate from very different fields of knowledge and served practical, epistemological and political goals.
As the Swedish example shows, several actors were actively engaged in the creation, implementation, and dissemination of knowledge within the early modern city. From scholars to craftspeople, from the church to the courts – actors with different institutional, social, and cultural backgrounds contributed to the formation of an urban body that was shaped by and through their knowledge-making. Objects and materials of local, regional, and even global origin were as much involved as images, histories, and stories.
Numerous scholars have explored the situatedness of knowledge production (Livingstone, Shapin), the relationship between craft and academic knowledge (Smith, Bertucci), and between architecture and natural science (Galison, Gerbino). The significance of instruments (Bennett, Dupré), objects (Findlen, Bertoloni Meli) and maps (Ballon, Friedman) for knowledge production and (global) circulation has been considered as well as the relationship between urban space and knowledge (Sennett, De Munck, Long).
Based on this research, the session aims to shed light on the city as a contact zone and as a subject and object of making, circulating, implementing, and institutionalising knowledge in the early modern period. In order to gain insights into the reciprocal process that both practically and theoretically shapes the city and situates architecture within a broader field of knowledge-making, we seek contributions that address the following topics, among others:
Institutions of knowledge production and their urban and social context (e.g. the architecture of workshops, guilds, universities, academies).
Urban space and architecture as an object and laboratory of transdisciplinary knowledge production (e.g. excavations, surveys, fortifications, but also lighting, hygiene, burial, building standards, pattern books).
The city as a contact zone across different fields and cultures of knowledge (e.g. natural and political philosophy, mathematics, medicine, arts and crafts).
Conceptualizations and representations of the built city (e.g. as models of social order, in terms of territorial or cultural affiliation).
We warmly welcome contributions from across the globe.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Michael Asgaard Andersen, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen
Solmaz Sadeghi, Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen
Hilde Heynen, KU Leuven
Housing for Seniors: From Welfare State Models to Socialization of Care in Flanders
Espen Johnsen, FIKK, University of Oslo
Fehn and Grung’s Økern Home for the Elderly (1950–55): Living Arrangements and Sensory Spatial Experience
Irina Davidovici, gta Archive, ETH Zurich
Autonomy and Care in Elderly Housing in Zurich
Esther Lorenz, School of Architecture, University of Virginia
Intrinsic Care: Ageing in a High-Density City
Weihong Bao, Department of Film and Media, UC Berkeley
Dwelling in a Social(ist) Media Environment
Societies are growing older, and architecture plays a part in how they do so by organising care, mediating autonomy, and framing the experience of aging. Caring for Aging traces how housing for older adults has been imagined, designed, and inhabited across the twentieth century and into the present—sites where welfare-state policies, design ideologies, and everyday practices intersect. It approaches elderly housing not merely as a specialised typology, but as a lens through which to interrogate autonomy and dependency, domesticity and institutionalisation, and shifting responsibilities among states, municipalities, families, and communities. The session positions elderly housing as a site of negotiation between policy, place, and personhood, where architecture has mediated the political, social, and emotional realities of growing old.
Bringing together case studies from Belgium, Norway, Switzerland, Hong Kong, and China, the session juxtaposes distinct welfare regimes and urban conditions—Nordic, Continental European, and Asian—each with different configurations of care, family, and state. The papers chart the evolution of care environments from postwar welfare frameworks to contemporary models emphasising ‘ageing in place’, collective living, and community-based support. While grounded in specific contexts, they open wider questions about how ageing is governed and supported through built form, institutional arrangements, and everyday infrastructures of care. The contributions show how architectural form, typological planning, and organisational systems shape everyday life—not only through accommodation and accessibility, but through infrastructures of mobility, sociality, and routine, including the possibilities for community and intergenerational exchange. Across these contexts, architecture mediates between private life and collective systems, standardised provision and situated needs, and the desire to sustain dignity and agency within increasingly managed environments.
In dialogue with current debates on care as a critical lens, the session foregrounds care as a spatial and relational practice: enacted through material settings and forms of labour, but also shaped by administrative frameworks, policy agendas, and media environments. Together, the papers offer a comparative architectural history of how care has been spatialised and contested, asking whether emerging models reproduce older institutional logics or enable new forms of ageing that allow older adults not only to remain in place, but to thrive socially, emotionally, and spatially. Ultimately, the session reframes elderly housing not only as infrastructure, but as an ethical and civic question—a reflection of how societies choose to care, and to age, together.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Sigrid de Jong, ETH Zurich
sigrid.dejong@gta.arch.ethz.ch
Nikos Magouliotis, ETH Zurich
nikolaos.magouliotis@gta.arch.ethz.ch
Dominik Muller, ETH Zurich
Mark Crinson, Birkbeck College, University of London
Slavers’ Ionic
Maur Dessauvage, Columbia University
Symbol, Character, Folklore: Leo von Klenze's Reconstruction of the Tuscan Temple
Karan Saharya, Bauhaus Universität Weimar, TU Berlin
The Picturesque and the Grotesque: Orientalist Constructions of Varanasi’s Architectural ‘Character’, 1700–1900
Marco Salazar-Valle, University of Pennsylvania - Weitzman School of Design
The elusive character of Andean monuments: European Enlightenment’s (mis)representations and modern archaeology
Emma Letizia Jones, Hong Kong University
Architectural Character and the 'Psychic Unity of Mankind’, from the South Pacific to Lake Zurich
The eighteenth century was at once the period when Classical architecture was canonized in the Western world and beyond, and the moment when its supposedly universal ideal came into crisis. The study of competing practices and traditions of various medieval (Romanesque, Gothic, Byzantine) and vernacular architectures in Europe, and the allure of ‘Oriental’ styles (filtered through Turquerie and Chinoiserie) challenged the claims of Classicism, as did the encounters with different extra-European building traditions through travel and colonialism. These encounters prompted an avid preoccupation with cultural difference, as evidenced in Voltaire’s Essai sur les moeurs et l’esprit des nations (1756), Vico’s Principi di una scienza nuova d’intorno alla natura delle nazioni (1725–1744) or Hume’s Of National Characters (1748).
Before the systematic global histories of architecture of the nineteenth century (Brouwer, Bressani & Armstrong, Narrating the Globe, 2023), and previous to the notion of style (Hvattum, Style and Solitude, 2023), Western authors employed a particular term to describe cultural specificity and difference: character. Stemming originally from the Greek word χαρακτήρ, its meaning evolved from the tool with which one carved signs on a wax or stone surface, over denoting these signs themselves, to the imprint these had on a reader or viewer. The distinctiveness of that impact, and the marks of identity of a whole culture in its environment and material culture, was encapsulated by its character. As such, from 1750 onwards the notion of character became ubiquitous in a variety of languages and was used in reference to people, buildings and landscapes, and shared across different genres of writing and scientific disciplines: from travel literature, political theory and ethnography, over treatises of art and architecture, to gardening manuals.
This session interrogates the architectural category of character in the globalizing world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, by zooming in on its meanings, implications and complexities in moments of encounter between Western and non-Western cultures and architectures. The five papers in this session venture gradually further afield, from Europe to Asia, the Americas and the South Pacific, and from the core corpus of architectural theory to anthropology, archaeology and other disciplines. They explore how Western accounts used the notion of character to describe non-Western architectures, building traditions, cultures, landscapes and places that challenged Western taxonomies and categorizations of architectural style. Together, we will discuss a variety of written, visual and material sources, drawn from various disciplines, to expand the critical history of the term character beyond its well-established place in the history of European architectural theory.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Megha Chand Inglis, The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL
Nina Vollenbröker, The Bartlett School of Architecture UCL
Katie Lloyd Thomas, Newcastle University
‘Sit Down Jobs’: Disabled veterans and window making in Crittall’s new factory at Silver End (1926)
Fatema Tasmia, Boston University
Handmade Modernism: Concealed Disabilities, Vulnerability, and Materiality in 1960s East Pakistan
James Graham, California College of the Arts
The Architecture of Occupational Therapy: George Edward Barton’s Consolation House
Anna Ulrikke Andersen, Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Caring for Buildings while Being in Care: Norwegian Patients with Rheumatism Navigating Treatment Abroad
Helen Stratford, Sheffield Hallam University
(Un)Productive Spatialisations
This session brings together contributions joined by the conviction that it is important to consider architecture’s histories through the diversity of bodies that construct our built environment.
Diverse individuals make up the architectural production workforce, and recent architectural histories have paid much-needed attention to marginalised voices, addressing, for example, gender, culture, and race in the construction of the built environment. Making buildings, however, is deeply linked to a further critical factor which remains under-researched: disability (including deafness, neurodiversity, and chronical illness).Many construction workers identify as disabled (approx. 20,000 in the UK), and architectural production systems are a key cause of disability.
At the same time, disabled bodyminds make distinct creative contributions to architecture. Overlooking disability within architectural production reinforces problematic spatial perceptions which create certain bodies as less impactful, less modern, or less worthy than others and sidelines the generative and creative potential of disability and difference.
Lately, Critical Disability Studies has gained traction in architectural discourse, but its concerns remain limited to building users and, more recently, to disabled architects. It therefore seems crucial to bring the bodies and minds of those who make our architecture to Disability Studies.
Similarly, architectural history has been invigorated by the emergent field of Production Studies, advancing critical understandings of relationships between the design of the built environment and the labour of constructing it. However, it does not yet specifically address disability.
Using both fields’ historical, methodological, and political concerns, this session encourages the explorations of new architectural histories focusing on social and spatial justice from the vantage of disabled bodies. Papers address urgent questions such as: What is the creative potential of disability in the construction workforce and how has this played out historically? How can research at the intersections of Disability Studies and Production Studies problematise the fast and able productive body working in capitalist regimes of labour? How do production systems and processes affect the world of disabled users, architects, and builders?
Overall, then, approaching the construction of the built environment through a non-normative lens, this session highlights histories, bodies, and design and building practices usually left in the shadows of architectural scholarship.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Catharina Nolin, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University
catharina.nolin@arthistory.su.se
Elin Bergman, Department of Culture and Aesthetics, Stockholm University
Amy F. Ogata, University of Southern California
Engineering and Exhibiting an Aesthetic Infrastructure in the Park at the Exposition Universelle, Paris 1867
Mojgan Aghaei Meybodi, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
Reviving Empire: Displaying Persian Heritage and Nationhood at International Exhibitions (1851–1935)
Joy Burgess and Luca Csepely-Knorr, University of Liverpool School of Architecture
From ‘Public Parks and Gardens’ to ‘Landscapes of Work and Leisure’: the development of mid 20th century landscape architecture in Britain told through four exhibitions
Marta García Carbonero, School of Architecture, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Greenwashing the Francoist Regime: The Garden Exhibition at the 2nd IFLA International Conference in Madrid, 1950
Exhibitions and public installations of different scales have since the late 1700s been an established and important medium to exhibit, present, and display innovative industrial and engineering inventions as well as arts and architecture, all contributions forming a contemporary snapshot of the period’s most advanced developments and ideals in different fields (Greenhalgh, 2011; Bremmer, 2015). The emergence of large international exhibitions during the mid nineteenth century developed an exhibition culture that drew large audiences, which in turn lead to great exposure of the exhibited objects on-site and the exhibition phenomena as such (Ekström, 1994; Filipová, 2015). Furthermore, the widespread reports in newspapers and magazines expanded the impact of the exhibitions, through which the objects, innovations, and ideals thereby reached further in time and space than the actual ephemeral event of the exhibition.
The scholarly investigation of exhibition cultures has to a great extent focused on industrial innovations, the exhibitions as an area to represent ideas about national identity, and exhibitions in relation to other mediums of representations in general (Smeds, 1996). The field of design and architecture was an important part of the exhibited content, and even though the display of examples of gardens, landscapes, and architecture to some extent has been researched, there are more themes to discover and develop further (Maloney, 2012, Rydell, 2018). The exhibitions were important for various reasons. For the individual designer and for firms, the exhibitions provided an arena to present their work and to attract customers and expand their professional networks. During the period 1850-1950 women gardeners, landscape architects, and architects entered the professional arena and participated frequently in exhibitions alongside other (male) professionals both as individual designers and in collaborative projects (Boussahba-Bravard & Rogers, 2018; Nolin, 2024).
The over-arching purpose of the session is to contribute to that cause and deepen the understanding on how elements of our designed surroundings have been presented to a wider audience 1850-1950, with emphasis on content and presentation. We therefore welcome papers from scholars working on exhibitions, exhibition practices, and exhibited objects in a broad sense within the fields of horticulture, garden and landscape design, and architecture. Paper proposals are encouraged to deal with – but are not limited to – themes concerning sites (e.g. exhibition spaces, three-dimensional installations), techniques (e.g. drawings, plans, photographs, models, horticultural displays), pedagogy (e.g. presentation, propaganda, distribution of new developments), actors (e.g. exhibition directors and committees, designers), social aspects (e.g. exhibitions as sites of social intermingle between different social groups, gender relations, representation, and professionalisation processes), historiography of exhibitions (e.g. exhibition history and practices, politics of exhibitions) and methodologies on how to research ephemeral phenomena such as exhibitions, temporary installations and exhibited objects of different kinds.
Selected literature
Boussahba-Bravard, M., & Rogers, R. (2018). Women in international and universal exhibitions, 1876-1937. Routledge.
Bremmer, M. (2015). Konsten att tämja en bild: Fotografiet och läsarens uppmärksamhet i 1800-talets Sverige. Mediehistoria, Lunds universitet.
Ekström, A. (1994). Den utställda världen: Stockholmsutställningen 1897 och 1800-talets världsutställningar. Nordiska museet.
Filipová, M. (2015). Cultures of International Exhibitions 1840-1940. Routledge.
Greenhalgh, P. (2011). Fair world: A history of world’s fairs and expositions, from London to Shanghai, 1851-2010. Papadakis.
Maloney, C. Jean. (2012). World’s fair gardens: Shaping American landscapes. University of Virginia Press.
Nolin, C. (2024). Kvinnliga trädgårdsarkitekter i Sverige: En yrkesroll växer fram. Appell förlag.
Rydell, R. W. (2018). Exhibition architecture in American world fairs. Oxford Art Online. doi.org/10.1093/oao/9781884446054.013.2000000052
Smeds, K. (1996). Helsingfors - Paris: Finlands utveckling till nation på världsutställningarna 1851-1900. Svenska litteratursällsk. i Finland.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Kim Förster, Manchester Architecture Research Group, The University of Manchester
Adam Przywara, Institute for Global European Studies, University of Basel
Caner Arıkboğa, Middle East Technical University
Landfill as Infrastructure: Understanding Politics of Excavation with Hafriyat Komiserliği
Ella Müller, Department of History, European University Institute
Expanding the Capital: Construction Waste and Land Reclamation in 1920s and 1930s Helsinki
Tom Broes, Ghent University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel & Université Libre de Bruxelles
Bricks and Waste Clay Pits in the Rupel Region as Reciprocal Landfills of Belgium’s Regime of Cheap Urbanisation
Kshitija Mruthyunjaya, The University of Manchester
The Hidden Landfills of Architectural Whiteness: Titanium Dioxide Production and Accumulated Injustice in Kerala, India
Elis Mendoza, Princeton University School of Architecture
The 1985 Mexico Earthquake Traces: From Modern “Miracle” Building Material to Indigenous Rewilded Rubble
The Warsaw Uprising Mound, the Trümmerberge across Germany, Liverpool’s Crosby Beach, and Leslie Spit in Lake Ontario near Toronto are paradigmatic examples of twentieth-century landfills of construction and demolition waste. Emerging from urban warfare and architectural obsolescence (Abramson, 2016), these landforms constitute a unique architectural record structured by cycles of development and destruction. Nonetheless, despite increasing scholarly interest in extraction, production, and demolition, landfills remain an underrepresented—if not repressed—subject in architectural and urban history. Rooted in disciplinary calls to critically examine architecture’s waste (Cairns and Jacobs, 2014), this panel positions the landfill as a crucial site of inquiry for historians of the built environment in the Anthropocene.
Over the past decade, historians and theorists have analysed the centrality of wasteland to the development of modern concepts of property and productivity (Di Palma, 2014), examined abandoned spaces produced by twentieth-century capitalist and socialist industrialisation (Hauser, 2001), and explored the entanglement of wasting and production in the built environment (Labban, 2019). Although the issue of architecture’s waste—and of landfilling in particular—is addressed by the Basel Convention (1989) and the EU Landfill Directive (1999), a comprehensive history beyond the official chronologies remains to be written, aside from a few notable exceptions (Cerba and Hutton, 2021). Moving beyond these regulatory timelines and the imaginaries of control and containment they legitimise, this panel foregrounds the material and environmental realities of construction and demolition waste (CDW) and the landscapes it produces.
Recognising ongoing challenges—including the sheer volume of CDW, which accounts for nearly 40 per cent of all solid waste globally, and its toxicity, involving substances such as asbestos, PCBs, and radioactivity—the panel engages with more complex and globally situated architectural histories of landfills. Drawing on the concept of “reciprocal landscapes” (Hutton, 2018), it examines the historical role of the architectural profession in classifying, depositing, and reclaiming waste; identifies strategies of urbanization, landfill development, and property formation; traces material flows linking construction sites and disposal areas; analyses the complicity of the building materials industry in perpetuating waste and pollution; and explores the situated politics and economies of contamination and land use.
Selected Literature
Abramson, Daniel M. Obsolescence: An Architectural History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.
Cairns, Stephen, and Jane M. Jacobs. Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.
Cerba, Alison, and Jane Hutton. “Demolishing the City, Constructing the Shoreline.” In History of Construction Cultures, Volume 1, edited by João Mascarenhas-Mateus and Ana Paula Pires, 350–358. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2021.
Di Palma, Vittoria. Wasteland: A History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014.
Foster, Heidi, and Jennifer Schopf. “Urban Ecological Evolution through Mineral Migration: Extracting, Recomposing, Demolishing and Recolonizing Toronto’s Landscape.” Landscript 5 (2017): 47–64.
Hauser, Susanne. Metamorphosen des Abfalls: Konzepte für alte Industrieareale. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 2001.
Hutton, Jane. Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements. New York: Routledge, 2019.
Labban, Mazen. “Rhythms of Wasting / Unbuilding the Built Environment.” New Geographies 10 (2019): 33–41.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Elif Kaymaz, Middle East Technical University
elifkaymz@gmail.com; ekaymaz@metu.edu.tr
Emine Esra Nalbant, Binghampton University
Dilek Özkan-Pantazis, The Cyprus Institute
Sea Power at the Frontier: Ottoman Fortresses and the Politics of the Eastern Mediterranean, 1715–1821
Pritam Dey, University of California Los Angeles
The littoral as a Laboratory: Making Frontiers of Risk in the coastal Bengal Delta, 1960s–1990s
Asya Ece Uzmay, Cornell University
Architecture for Diplomacy: Wet Boundaries of Evros/Maritza/Meriç River
Dana Salama, University of Michigan Ann-Arbor
The Architecture of the Frontier: Earth, Empire, and the Militarization of Southern Algeria
An Tairan, ETH Zurich
The Highest Frontier: Capanna Margherita and the Limits of Habitability
Lucien Febvre’s (1928) etymological and conceptual exploration of the term frontière in the context of French history reveals its militaristic, architectural, and juridical dimensions: it refers the frontline of an army, the façade of a building, and the shifting boundaries of territory. Similarly, the Arabic term cabha(t) (جبهة), meaning "forehead" or "front," highlights the symbolic and spatial significance of the frontier, rooted in *cbh* and reflected in Aramaic/Syriac as a “high place.” This is paralleled in Turkish with cephe, which carries the additional meaning of “a certain point of view.” From Frederick Jackson Turner’s (1893) "frontier thesis," which employed the frontier as a flexible concept to justify settler colonialism by framing it as a space of opportunity while simultaneously obscuring the violence of Indigenous displacement and dispossession, to Eyal Weizman’s (2007) notion of “frontier architecture,” which describes frontiers as “deep, shifting, fragmented, and elastic territories” that extend beyond the mere edges of political space to permeate its depths.
Frontiers serve not only as sites of spatiality and imagery but also as fertile grounds for explanation. While often equated with borders, boundaries, and limits, frontiers transcend the notion of mere liminality. They represent both a site of expansion and a point from which one projects outward. As such, a frontier delineates the boundary of one’s existence, extending outward to encompass nations, military zones, territories, and even atmospheric boundaries as entities.
This session seeks to explore frontiers as both a framework for discussing the histories of built environments and as material realities where complex, dynamic, and multifaceted architectural situations unfold. We approach frontiers not solely as dividing lines, zones of transition, or mechanisms of control, but also as sites of activism, resistance, and change. We are particularly interested in histories of frontiers that reflect the “restless, nervous energy,” as Turner describes it.
Departing from Thomas Nail’s (2016) approach that reduces the frontier to a functional boundary, while also acknowledging his assertion that it serves as a generator of processes such as expulsion, expansion, and compulsion, this session aims to expand on the questions such as; how frontiers operate spatially? What kind of building stories do frontiers generate? What critical issues emerge when we put frontiers in use as a concept in architectural history? By framing architecture as a mediator of movement, conflict, and transformation, this session seeks to deepen our understanding of how kinetics of frontiers -the shifting, unstable, and contested nature- have functioned in building, unbuilding, and imagining environments.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Henriette Steiner, University of Copenhagen
Maximilian Sternberg, University of Cambridge
Elettra Carnelli, ZHAW - ETH Zurich
Building Municipal Welfare: Politically Motivated Collaborations for Rozzano’s Educational Infrastructure (c.1950–1970)
Svava Riesto, University of Copenhagen
Collaborations on the building site:Landscapers and the negotiation of professional identities, power and class in 1960s Denmark
Łukasz Stanek, University of Michigan
Decolonizing Collaboration
Meike Schalk, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Organizing Collaboration: The Open Schools
Ekaterina Mizrokhi, Newnham College - University of Cambridge
DIY Modernity: Bottom-up Collaboration in the Soviet Mass Housing Program
In the emerging European welfare states of the post-World War 2 period, the building boom from roughly 1945 to 1975 was characterized by great technological, architectural, urban and social innovations which went hand-in-hand with industrialization of architectural construction. While the latter has often been subject to criticism, several researchers have pointed out that the architecture of the period was also characterized by an exceptional type of holistic thinking whereby architects, landscape architects and planners worked closely together across professional divides and joined forces with engineers, politicians, builders, artists, social workers, teachers, doctors, residents and many others to create a new built environment that would befit the period’s emerging welfare states.1 This particularly concerns large-scale public architecture projects such as public housing, museums, hospitals and schools – Aarhus University being a seminal example from Denmark. Moreover, this happened at a time when the educational landscape was changing, and new social groups were entering educational programmes and thus also entering professional practice in the design fields.
The contributions of practitioners across architecture, landscape architecture and planning have traditionally been investigated in separate streams of historical research. But how did people from these professions work together in the building boom period of the mid-20th century? What characterized their invisible collaborations across differences of profession, class, gender, generation and geography? In which ways was their work interlaced with that of people from other disciplines or societal sectors when it came to the value-driven transformative ethos that characterized much of welfare state architecture, landscape architecture and planning? What, then, did it take to make a collaboration successful, and when and where did barriers and conflicts emerge? And what value did these collaborative constellations hold for architecture in a period where the built environment was changing rapidly? These are the questions that will broached by the contributors to this session, thereby challenging architectural historians to shed light on the invisible collaborations that have shaped the built environment of the mid-20th century’s European welfare states. Methodologically, moreover, the session will ask what strategies can be developed in the face of the dearth of archival material that researchers often face when looking for documentation of collaborations across professional boundaries and diverse social groups.
We welcome papers from different national contexts that bring to light case studies of collaborative efforts in particular on public commissions of European welfare states in the mid-20th century, covering different paradigms of post-war Western European welfare states,2 as well as looking for case studies from other national contexts and covering different typologies of publicly commissioned projects such as public housing, museums, hospitals and schools.
The session will provide invaluable knowledge about how the cities and landscapes of this period – a period which has left the greatest imprint in physical terms on the current built environment of Europe – came to be. In doing so, it will create a more accurate basis for today’s many tasks regarding the repurposing or transformation of the built fabric from the mid-20th century building boom period, highlighting the relevance of architecture history for spatial practitioners today.
1 See e.g. Woudstra, J.,“Danish Landscape Design in the Modern Era (1920-1970)”, in: Garden History 2, 1995, pp. 222-241 and Bendsen, J.R., Riesto, S. and Steiner, H., “Collaboration – A Story About how Architecture Comes Into Being”, chapter 5 of Untold Stories. Copenhagen: Strandberg Publishing 2023, pp. 248–95. Whilst the architectural and urban histories of the post-war welfare states have formed a burgeoning field in recent years, key publications include Worpole, K., Here Comes the Sun. Architecture and Public Space in Twentieth-Century European Culture, London: Reaction Books, 2000; Wagenaar, C. ed., Happy: Cities and Public Happiness in Post-war Europe. Rotterdam: NAIPress, 2004; Avermaete, T., van Heuvel, D., eds., “The European Welfare State Project: Ideals, Politics, Cities and Buildings”. Special Issue of the Footprint Journal, 9, Autumn 2011; Swenarton, M., Avermaee, T., van den Heuvel, D. eds., Architecture and the Welfare State. New York: Routledge 2015. Lotz, K., Simpson, D., Raahauge, K. M., Vindum, K., Jensen, M. J., & Bendsen, J. R., eds. Forming Welfare. Copenhagen: The Danish Architectural Press, 2027.
2 See Esping-Andersen, G. The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Caterina Cardamone, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Lorenzo Vigotti, Alma mater studiorum – Università di Bologna
Sara Galletti, Duke University
Sailing Stones: The Practice of Stereotomy Across the Medieval Mediterranean
Anna Rebecca Sartore, Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, Universiteit Gent
The Stones of Perugia in the Renaissance
Gabriel Pereira, Universidade de Coimbra
Like a house of cards: building materials in the Renaissance renovation of the Convent of Christ in Tomar (Portugal)
Giovanni Santucci, Università di Pisa
Admiring, Importing, Reinventing: Cultural Imaginaries, Material Circulations, and Design Practices of Imported Marbles and Stones in England (c. 1650-1750)
In his 1645 French edition of Palladio, Pierre le Muet eliminated the chapters on building materials because of the differences between local practices in Italy and in France (“beaucoup de choses sont extremement differentes de celles qu’on pratique aujourd’huy en France”). Materials and techniques do not circulate well on paper. A stucco recipe may easily be disseminated with Italian architectural treatises, but North of the Alpes its composition might change, leaving out marble powder. Building materials and the associated techniques are thus closely linked to their region of origin, even more so in a period in which the costs and difficulties of travel and long-distance transport added to their prestige.
This session asks how exactly building materials and related techniques circulated across late medieval and early modern Europe, and how their travels affected their meanings.
A first issue concerns the actual transport of materials, the routes they follow, the movement of specific techniques and instruments, the migration of specialized craftsmen. How do foreign materials and people adapt to the local context and its traditional building practices? Well-known examples such as the use of Istrian stone along the Italian Adriatic coast or the export of black marble from ‘Flanders’ to other parts of Europe (Northern Europe but also Florence) show that these materials mainly travelled over water and along established trade routes. But what other routes did materials follow? Did the difficulties of transportation add value and meaning to these materials?
Another more literary issue concerns the circulation and perception of materials and techniques as documented in treatises, ekphrastic descriptions and other writings highlighting the materiality of architecture. In this case the distance bridged might not only be geographical but also temporal, as materials and techniques from Antiquity such as stucco, concrete, and porphyry were being rediscovered. What ancient or modern narratives and iconologies on building materials circulated in Europe? How did these impact the perception, use and imagery of these materials?
Not only marbles but also other natural stones and ceramic tiles were evidently vehicles of iconological meanings (Barry 2020, Dressen 2008, Butters 1996), because of their colors and texture, the difficulty of their fashioning, or the associated narratives on their history and provenance. How did these layered meanings contribute to the self-representation of patrons? What role did the imitation of materials, through painting or other media, play in this regard?
We invite papers that address any of these issues to illuminate how materials and their meanings travelled across Europe, and beyond, in the late medieval and early modern period.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Silvia Balzan, The University of Manchester
silvia.balzan@manchester.ac.uk
Giulia Scotto, ETH Zurich
Frans Saraste, Aalto University
Cold Cellar, Warm Cellar, Cold War(m) Cellar
Sarah Nichols, EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
Nowhere to Go but Down: GECUS and Subterranean Urbanism
Phoebe Springstubb, History of Art, University of Michigan
The Engineers and the “Eternal Frost”
Jia Weng, University of Tennessee
The Geological Clouds: Furnaces and Servers, Limestone and Data
Sabina Favaro, Responsible Mining Lab, Wits, Johannesburg
Toxic Thresholds of a Subterranean Palimpsest: Extractive ecologies, slow violence and the question of care
Subterranean spaces have long oscillated between refuge and threat, promise and dispossession: cellars and shelters, mines and vaults, tunnels and pipes, archives and bunkers. This panel approaches “the underground” not only as a physical stratum but also as a cultural and political figure, an arena where modernity’s infrastructures and imaginaries take material form, where labour and risk are often rendered invisible, and where ecological processes are engineered, exploited, or made to appear controllable. In Dostoevsky’s novel Notes from the Underground (1864), the subterranean served as a metaphor for human isolation, alienation, and resistance to rationalist modernity. Historian of technology Rosalind Williams, in her 1990 book, whose title borrows from Dostoevsky’s work, interpreted fictional undergrounds (such as those depicted in Jules Verne’s and H.G. Wells’ novels) as offering a prophetic lens on life in a technology-dominated world, foregrounding the fragility of finite ecosystems and the technical consequences of “the human empire on earth.”
Bringing architectural history into dialogue with adjacent fields, the session asks how underground environments mediate power and knowledge, how they organise comfort and resource flows, enable technocratic solutions to crises of the surface city, and sustain extractive regimes. Encompassing diverse geographies and scales, the selected papers define the underground as a thermopolitical and geopolitical medium that stores, cools, and circulates fuel, heat, data, and water while also sedimenting the afterlives of Cold War security, colonial expansion, and racialised extraction. The selected papers “unearth” how subterranean built environments, from domestic basements to permafrost landscapes, mined caverns, and gold infrastructures, materialise competing visions of futurity and how these visions are increasingly strained by environmental threats and uneven social repair.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Johan Lagae, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University
Monika Motylińska, Leibniz Institute for Society and Space (IRS), Erkner
monika.motylinska@leibniz-irs.de
Craig Buckley, Department of the History of Art, Yale University
Platform Cinema: Newsreel Theaters as Transport Architecture
Nicole Elsie Nonhanhla Sithole, Sidney Sussex College, University of Cambridge
Domestic Boundaries and Public Interfaces: Reading Railway Architecture in Colonial Zimbabwe
Richard Williams, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
What to do with the motorway overpass: learning from London’s Westway
Ksenia Litvinenko, Leibniz Institute for Society and Space (IRS), Erkner
“A Road to Oil”: Surgut Road-Building Trust and the Transport Architectures of Siberian Petroleum Extraction, 1980–1991
Meghan Ho-Tong, School of Architecture, Planning & Geomatics at University of Cape Town
Surface Tensions: Park Station and Extractive Railway Infrastructures in South Africa
In the aftermath of the spatial and infrastructural turns, global histories of transport infrastructure are being written across a wide range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (e.g. van Laak 2004, Harvey 2016, Zunino 2018). Yet the “stubborn materiality” (Bridges 2023) and spatiality of roads, railways, subways, ports, as well as the buildings that serve them – infrastructures we would like to define as “transport architecture” – remain conspicuously understudied.
In order to bring this materiality and spatiality of transport architecture to the centre of the analysis, we propose to dedicate attention specifically to architectural structures that function as thresholds or junctions, as intermediaries connecting and bordering different social conditions and spatial regimes – analogically to the bridge and the door (Simmel 1909, Teyssot 2013). We are interested in discussions of how transport architecture responds to these differences on each side of the threshold in its design and materiality and how it alters them. We also seek to identify junctions in the infrastructural systems, acting as visible and invisible joints and divides between various modes and patterns of mobility. Following this aim, we intend to dissect the analysed structures both from horizontal and vertical perspectives and across different scales, from the small to the large (Bélanger 2006).
This approach leads us to consider such questions as what kind of transport architecture emerges, for instance, at border crossings, where road or railway infrastructures need to be adapted to different regulations and norms related to design or operation. It also invites us to investigate revolving doors at the entrances to a temperature-controlled skyway system or other liminal spaces connecting different climatic conditions.
While transport infrastructure has most often been studied from the vantage point of the spectacular (the bridge as an oeuvre d’art, for instance), we are particularly interested in contributions that engage with transport architecture starting from the small and the mundane, and draw on unexpected or often neglected source material as well as papers engaging with thresholds or junctions connecting and dividing different modes of mobility. The focus on unimposing architectures that are easy to overlook en passant shall allow us to consider how transport architecture inscribes itself in transient places (Jirón 2018). Chronologically, our session focuses on the long 20th century while it aims to be global in scope.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Will Davis, Università della Svizzera italiana
Rixt Woudstra, University of Amsterdam
Christy Anderson, University of Toronto
Binding Plants and Empires: Ropewalks in Plantation Worlds
Erika Astuti, Bandung Institute of Technology
Building Materials as Trading Commodities: The Malabar Tea Plantation in West Java
Elena M'Bouroukounda, Columbia University GSAPP
The Exclusive Share of the Slave: Transatlantic Habilitation and the French Plantation after Abolition (1848 -1860)
Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne
Undoing the Plantationocene: Gardens, Gossip and GriGri in the Seychelles Archipelago
Kenny Cupers, University of Basel
Unmaking the Plantation: Insurgent Architecture and Southern Pedagogy
Plantations have been sites of bodily and environmental violence since the sixteenth century on, when the shipment of people and things—sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton, timber, and cacao—across the Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans began. Architectural sites that pertain to plantation worlds are manifold. Big houses and haciendas, jails and watchtowers, slave gardens and maroon communities, mills and storage sheds, situated on land reshaped and reconfigured as commercial resource. A way to understand the plantation in history can be characterized by what Maan Barua calls the “plantation multiple,” identifying how it is the “production of sameness, the violent exploitation of human labor and other-than-human work, the transterritorial circulation of biota, the generation of simplified ecologies, and the ongoingness of extraction and plunder proliferate and become extensive with a wider set of practices in a social and ecological field.”(16)
The rural buildings and landscapes of the plantation find their metropolitan colonial counterparts in docks, warehouses, office buildings, and manor houses, department stores and stock exchanges strewn across contemporary cities today. In this session, we propose that to provincialize Europe, we must simultaneously cosmopolitanize the plantation by looking at European sites and those peripheral places that were crucial to its wealth together. Rebecca Ginsburg, Kathrine McKittrick and others have described plantations as villages, even urban structures, with their own legal and political regulations. In this way, rural, provisional, ephemeral structures facilitating monocrop agriculture in tropical places, like tobacco drying sheds in Cuba or Sumatra, can be read through the same global matrix as the headquarters of colonial trading companies or shopping arcades in London, Paris, or Amsterdam.
Following this line of thinking, where, we ask, does the plantation begin and end? And to what extent does this conceptual model enable new ways of thinking and doing architectural history? What geographic, cultural, environmental, or economic entanglements situate the rural architecture and landscapes of the plantation at the center of plantation worlds? The plantation itself enables a global history of architecture through the shared climatic histories of the tropical band, presenting ways of thinking through history beyond singular hegemonic structures of colony or nation. We are interested in the way that conceptual models help to bridge geographies of knowledge, and how architectural historians might draw inspiration from examples such as Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (1993) or Henley and Wickramasinghe’s recent “Monsoon Asia,” (2023) which have provided an opening for shared social and environmental histories.
Contributions that address notions of (economic) risk and volatility incorporated into the logic of plantation architectures, as well as buildings that embody the clashes and confrontations between plantation capitalist worlds and their opposites, such as maroon communities, runaways, resistances, and the forms of small-scale settlement, farming, and living that come with it are especially welcome.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Nuno Grancho, The Royal Danish Academy, Copenhagen / University of Copenhagen / University Institute of Lisbon
nuno.grancho@teol.ku.dk, nuno.grancho@iscte-iul.pt
Theodora Giovanazzi, EPFL - Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne
Privacy Codified. Domestic Space, Typology, and Social Hierarchy from Serlio’s Book VI to the Fuggerei in Early Modern Europe
Oliver Brax, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
Social reform’s uneasy intimacy. The hammock and collective institutions in nineteenth-century France
Peter Thule Kristensen, The Royal Danish Academy, University of Copenhagen
Bringing the separate together: Gottlieb Bindesbøll’s Psychiatric Hospitals and Prison Projects
Pari Riahi, College of Humanities and Fine Arts, University of Massachusetts Amherst
The No-Go Zones and the No-Man’s Lands
Andreea Mihalache, Richard McMahan School of Architecture, Clemson University
Boredom, Disprivacy, and Domesticity: From the (Cracked) Picture Window to Instagram
This session explores the complex relationship between privacy, the private, and architecture throughout history. While privacy in Western contexts extends beyond individual concerns to shape relationships with space, self, and community, architectural history has yet to fully engage with privacy as a critical lens of analysis.
Despite extensive scholarship on public and private realms in other disciplines, privacy remains underexplored in architectural discourse. Drawing on theoretical frameworks established by scholars like Jürgen Habermas, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault, who have examined the evolution of public/private distinctions and spatial power dynamics, this session aims to bridge this gap. More recent contributions from scholars such as Beatriz Colomina on the mediated nature of modern architectural privacy, Georges Teyssot on the body’s relationship to domestic space, Mette Birkedal Brunn on Early Modern Privacy and privacy studies method, and Peter Thule Kristensen on Early Modern Privacy and architecture will further inform our discussions.
Rather than simply applying existing privacy theories to architecture, we seek an interdisciplinary exchange that allows architectural elements to be reinterpreted through privacy studies and privacy concepts to be reconsidered through architectural analysis. We are particularly interested in how architecture becomes symbolically charged with privacy meanings, and conversely, how privacy is shaped by architectural forms and practices.
To provide focus for this broad topic, we encourage papers examining privacy and architecture from the Early Modern period to the present, a timeframe that encompasses critical transformations in Western conceptions of privacy alongside significant architectural developments.
This session invites contributions examining specific building typologies where privacy plays a central role in their conception, organisation, and use. For example:
Monasteries and convents: These structures provide rich case studies in how architecture regulates private devotion, communal living, and isolation. From the individual cell to the cloister, monastic architecture influenced Western conceptions of privacy and continues to resonate in staging prayer, study, and spiritual intimacy.
Domestic architecture: From the development of corridor plans that separated servants from family life in 17th-century homes, to the open-plan living of modernism that reconfigured private/public boundaries, to contemporary smart homes with surveillance capabilities that redefine intimacy.
Civil and military buildings: create spaces of secrecy, shelter, and privacy through secure architecture, restricted access, and controlled spatial organisation.
Healthcare facilities: The evolution of hospital wards from large common rooms to private patient rooms reflects changing attitudes toward privacy in healing environments and medical ethics.
Educational institutions: Boarding schools, dormitories, and study spaces reveal how architecture shapes learning through varying degrees of privacy and surveillance.
Cultural institutions: Museums, libraries, and theaters that simultaneously offer public access while creating zones of private contemplation, study, or viewing.
We welcome papers exploring diverse architectural elements that frame privacy, including:
• Urban plans that establish public/private boundaries
• Spatial hierarchies and circulation patterns that control access and visibility
• Thresholds, screens, and partitions that mediate between private and public realms
• Sensory dimensions of privacy through acoustics, lighting, and material properties
• Domestic elements like alcoves and private rooms that accommodate bodily needs
• Documentation practices that reveal or conceal private aspects of architectural use
We particularly value contributions that examine concrete examples and take critical stances on the relationship between privacy and architecture, questioning conventional narratives and offering new interpretative frameworks.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Demetra Vogiatzaki, gta/ETH Zurich
Maarten Delbeke, gta/ETH Zurich
Argue like it’s 1599? The rebuilding of St. Galler Landkirchen and Catholic Enlightenment
Michael Yonan, University of California, Davis
Enlightenment Ecologies in the Bavarian Rococo Church
Natalie Patricia Körner, Royal Danish Academy & Bastian Felter Vaucanson, University of Copenhagen
God, Guns, and Governance: Spirituality in the Schimmelmann Chapel
Ahmet Erdem Tozoglu, Istanbul Technical University
Piety, Prestige, and Provincial Authority: Âyân Religious Architecture in Western Anatolia, c. 1700–1850
In recent decades, the traditional view of the Enlightenment as a period of radical secularization and material monism has been substantially revised. Scholars such as David Sorkin, Jonathan Israel, Catherine Maire, Paschalis Kitromilides, and Robert Darnton have emphasized the enduring and multifaceted role of religion and spirituality, across both institutional and popular expressions, in shaping the politics, culture, and everyday life of the long eighteenth century. Architectural histories of the period, however, have often lagged behind this historiographical turn, overlooking the importance of religion and spirituality in the formation of Enlightenment culture, limiting their scope to strictly formal analysis, or dismissing non sanctified spaces and lived experiences of sacrality as residual or anomalous within a narrative of progressive disenchantment.
This session examines the political, social, and aesthetic resonances of sacred space in the Enlightenment. From state sponsored and public programs to local, vernacular, and intimate expressions of sacrality, it asks how architecture and the built environment reflected, mediated, or resisted evolving religious identities, dogmatic debates, and communal rituals. Following the lead of scholarship such as Karsten Harries on Bavarian Rococo churches and Ünver Rüstem on Ottoman Baroque forms and their entanglement with Christian and Islamic traditions, the session integrates formal analysis with socio politically embedded approaches, foregrounding spatial practices that have often remained peripheral to dominant narratives of Enlightenment architecture.
The four papers explore this terrain through distinct but complementary lenses: confessional architecture and Catholic Enlightenment in late eighteenth century Switzerland; rococo pilgrimage churches and Enlightenment conceptions of nature in rural Bavaria; the architectural mediation of spirituality, labor discipline, and colonial power in a Danish industrial estate; and provincial religious patronage in western Anatolia as a form of negotiated authority beyond imperial centers. Together, they advance a plural understanding of religious Enlightenment as a set of spatial practices shaped by reform, governance, and belief rather than as a single ideological project.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Lutz Robbers, Department of Architecture, Jade University, Oldenburg, Germany
Roy Kozlovsky, David Azrieli School of Architecture, Tel Aviv University
Gabriel Hernández, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid
Rendering Desire: Helmut Jacoby, Foster Associates, and the Politics of the Image in a Pre-digital Context
Uri Wegman, Université libre de Bruxelles, Eliyahu Keller, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Rendering Probabilities: On the Nuclear Legacy of Architectural Photorealism
Iacopo Neri, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia Barcelona, Darío Negueruela del Castillo, Center for Digital Visual Studies, University of Zurich
Rendering Beyond Representation: On Machine Learning’s potential to transform historical architectural knowledge
Ines Tolic, Department of the Arts, University of Bologna
Digital Affects: Venice Biennale and the Emotional Impact of Renderings on Architectural Knowledge
Laura Nica, University of Westminster
Echoes of Absence: A digital archaeology of Zaha Hadid painting
Architecture renders the real. In our contemporary understanding, architectural rendering has become synonymous with photorealistic, often glossy visualizations of finalized architectural design projects, the metamorphosis of digital 3D models into highly persuasive, perspectival views of architectural and urban spaces to be built. Renderings have become ubiquitous elements of most design projects and competitions, striking simulations of predictable realities calculated more or less instantaneously by powerful CAD agents to seduce jury members, real estate developers, and policymakers. Hyper-realistic renderings change the way architecture is perceived and conceived. What still functions today as the translation of digitally modeled geometry by an underlying algorithm into a quasi-photographic image is currently being surpassed by powerful AI tools that generate architectural 'renderings' based on language prompts or diagrammatic notations.
Yet, despite the ubiquitous presence of renderings in today's architectural practices and discourses, little scholarly attention has been devoted to better understand what renderings are and how they have changed the design process, as well as how they operate as and within media of architectural knowledge. In addition, further inquiries are needed to elucidate rendering’s diachronic characteristics, including pre-digital, analog, and early historical rendering practices. A brief look at the extraordinary multitude of meanings the word ‘render’ evokes (“to supply”, “to transmit”, “to cause to become”, “to convert”, “to translate”, “to give back”, “to surrender”, “to put a first layer of plaster on a wall”) hints at a more complex phenomenon that exceeds simple notions of architectural representation or visualization. One might ask, whether present renderings continue the privileging of precise lines over decorative shadows, of rational and technical geometries over poetic and symbolic “embodied experience” which began with the architectural sciences since the French notion of dessin in the seventeenth century (Perez-Gomez/Pelletier 2000). Computational design no longer needs visual media such as lines to ‘represent’ space and the objects within it. Digital design allows for a deeper link between numbers and images to emerge, rendering both lines and shadows obsolete. Or, one might ask, whether renderings can still be conceived of architecture “giving back” reliable data of a measurable empirical reality, as it did, for example, in the case of Verniquet’s plan of trigonometric operations of Paris from 1792, or as “making complete”, as Quatremère de Quincy put it in 1832, or as media of “restitution” (Allais 2020).
The proposed panel invites specific case studies, both historical and contemporary, that address rendering practices in order to further explore the nexus between architecture and the image. Explorations of rendering further develop the intuition expressed by Walter Benjamin in 1933, when he discovered in Carl Linfert's Grundlagen der Architekturzeichnung a specific type of image that no longer "reproduces" but "produces" architecture as both planned reality and dream image (Benjamin 1933). How can architectural renderings contribute to contemporary debates about the "operative" (Krämer 2009; Bredekamp 2010) or mimetic potential of images? What role do renderings play in the constitution of architectural knowledge in the context of a supposed analogue/digital divide (Carpo 2010)? How do renderings fit into the constellation of imaging technologies and architectural historiography? How does the ongoing development of rendering practices (e.g. real-time rendering tools; animated renderings of movement through space; AI-generated renderings) alter the epistemological questions of architectural history and theory?
Chairs and Contact Details:
Costanza Beltrami, Stockholm University
costanza.beltrami@arthistory.su.se
Saida Bondini, University of Zurich, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut
Maria Shevelkina, Stanford University
Integrated Ignimbrites: Cappadocian Rock-Carved Architecture
Galaad Van Daele, ETH Zurich
From Pietre Spugne to Calcareous Tufa: A Geoarchitectural Investigation Into the Materiality of Florentine Grottoes
Berrin Terim, Clemson University
Pregnant Trees and Nursing Mothers: The Ontologies of Timber From Antiquity to the Renaissance
Jiayue Hao (speaker), Hiroyuki Shinohara (co-author), School of Architecture, the Chinese University of Hong Kong
From Living Bamboo to Living Structures: Material Vitality across Assembly and Use in Premodern Bamboo Houses
Alican Taylan, Cornell University
“All the Island is a City, and All the City an Island”: Suakin’s Coral Architecture Under Ottoman Rule
‘Although plants have no sense of touch, they nevertheless suffer when they are cut […] for their roots function as a mouth, to receive food; and the bark as skin; and the wood as flesh; and the knots or branches as arms with their nerves and veins’ writes Vincenzo Scamozzi discussing the use of wood as a building material in his The Idea of Universal Architecture (Venice, 1615). Scamozzi’s reflection about natural suffering surrendering to human necessity embodies a collision of ecological consciousness and anthropocentric values that also animates modern debates around natural and cultural heritage.
In addition to wood, coral, palms, reeds, bark, and turf (as in Scandinavian ‘sod roofs’) have long been used in architecture for their strength, flexibility, and insulating properties. In pre-modern epistemologies, even stone was seen as ‘alive’ and endowed with human qualities (Scamozzi’s pietra viva). Central to pre-modern building practices, yet side-lined in stories of architecture, living building materials offer a new angle to rethink the discipline from the perspective of the more-than-human, the cyclical, and the living.
Ecocritical and post-anthropocentric studies have challenged the long-established dualism between nature and culture. Proposing new ways of understanding such relations, from “vibrant matter” (Bennet 2010) to “naturalism” and “animism” (Descola 2005), such research urges a reconsideration of the historical entanglements between human and nonhuman dimensions. This panel engages with these debates by foregrounding the architectural traces of such interconnection: where life becomes form, and ecosystems are refigured as structures. Building as a form of human manipulation participated in a process of material as well as conceptual conversion: it turned animate, ecologically embedded life-forms into static, structural components of human spaces. Architectural structures thus emerge as hybrid entities, natureculture bodies that resonate with memories of the former lives of their natural materials. The papers in this panel explore these and related questions across geographic areas during the premodern period (from antiquity to ca. 1750), investigating architectural “afterlife” of living materials, with particular attention to how such transformations were understood, represented, or ritualized in historical contexts.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Gregorio Astengo, IE University Madrid
Linda Stagni, ETH Zurich
Eren Basak, University of Pennsylvania
Mobilizing Ancient Ruins, Automobiles, and International Tourism in 1970s Turkey: Ruinenstädte Rund um Kuşadası
Claudia Hopkins, University of Edinburgh
Toward cultural (mass) tourism. Cross-cultural perceptions of Granada, the ‘Oasis of Andalucía’
Lin Zhu, Southeast University
From Private Retreats to Public Assets: Garden Tourism and Urban Ideals in Seventeenth-Century China
Gonzalo Munoz-Vera, Virginia Tech
Panorama Guidebooks and the Colonial Idealization of the City: New York and Lima in 1830s London
Andrew Leach, Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane for Beginners
Historically, guidebooks have always propagated idealized images of cities. By operating strict selections of buildings, neighbourhoods and urban itineraries, guidebooks have consistently reproduced, reinforced and multiplied the expectations of readers/travellers. Over the centuries, this paradigm has been further consolidated by the referentiality and interdependency of this literary genre. Not only successive editions of the same book, but even different authors have reshaped similar content, imposing a tradition of authority and ideological visions of urban spaces and landscapes. A case in point is Girolamo Franzini’s edition of the 1557 book Le Cose Meravigliose dell’Alma Città di Roma. Republished in 1588 to celebrate the 1590 jubilee, the booklet established religious itineraries and practices of pilgrimage throughout the city. Structured as a limited list of significant places of worship, Le Cose Meravigliose propagated the glories of the capital of Christianity by constructing an organised and controlled urban realm for the economies and bodily practices of the Catholic faith. Franzini’s publication exemplifies how the guidebook builds urban ideals by normalising public expectations of the city.
The construction of a ‘promised’ city comes with the assumption that many of the more complex variables shaping urban space (local economies, collective spaces, social tensions, morphological transformations, environmental conditions…) are uninfluential to urban exploration, producing a simplified and individualised context. As a result, guidebooks operate under the assumption that cities are limitless resources. Through the guidebook, cities are presented as objects of temporary consumption, shaped into idealised spaces of organised, tailored movement, adaptable to any community of readers/travellers.
This session seeks to study when and how cities have historically clashed with the environmental, social, religious, political, and cultural idealization provided by the guidebooks. We want to explore how guidebooks have abstracted, codified, and rendered the thresholds between the marketable city, the expectations of the reader/traveller and the limits of the urban realm. We are especially interested in the ways in which a specific image of the environment (urban, natural, social…) has been idealised, and how this projected and mediatised reality relates with the more complex conditions of a place and the experience of the individual.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Mari Hvattum, The Oslo School of Architecture and Design
Anna Bortolozzi, Stockholm University
‘Under an Open Sky’: Gunnar Asplund, Ivar Tengbom and the Mediterranean
Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Yale School of Architecture
Aalto’s Sensoria
Louise Vanhee, Ghent University
Portable Skies — The Ceiling as Displaced Fragment in William Randolph Hearst’s Collecting Practices
Kieran Connoly, University of Newcastle
Cheap, Quick and Easy: Don Brown, Armstrong® World Industries and the Ceiling for Everywhere
Hugh Campbell, University College Dublin
Petals and Smells: the office ceiling responds to climate change
A ceiling is the upper interior surface of a room. Sometimes simply the underside of the floor or roof above, other times an independent membrane, the ceiling has an ambiguous tectonic status. Miming structure but rarely structural and often with an unobvious materiality, ceilings offer an unsurpassed field for representation, play, mimicry and metamorphosis. This session explores the richness and ambiguities of the ceiling – an architectural element charged, so says Gottfried Semper, with the task of overcoming “the oppressive feeling evoked by any separation between us and the open sky.”
The ceiling has a unique position among the elements of architecture. While other bits of buildings – floors, walls, windows, doors – are busy fulfilling their practical functions, distributing people, practices and objects as occasion requires, the ceiling is given over to something else altogether. In modern architecture, that “something else” is often pure technical performance, with ventilation, acoustical devices, and lighting densely packed into the ceiling’s suspended grid. Historically, the ceiling has taken on a far wider range of tasks. It announces the purpose of the room; the dreams and aspirations of the patron; the spiritual horizon within which the building belongs. In the ceiling of the royal tombs of Uganda the carefully aligned reed rings hung from the outer roof speak simultaneously of the identity of past kings and the cosmic order of the world. In Egyptian burial chambers, the ceiling embodies a miniature firmament through which the soul may travel, while in Chinese temples, the central dome forms a “sky-well” connecting heaven and earth.
Looking for papers that explore the meaning, making, and materiality of ceilings, the session is open to scholarship on any place or period. Of particular interest is the migration and metamorphosis of ceiling motifs across cultures and periods, for instance the way the coffered ceiling was translated into a multitude of hybrid materialities in the late middle ages onwards, or the way the Arabic muqarna ceiling changed its materials and construction principles when transferred from the Middle East and Northern Africa, to Spain and beyond. Or indeed; the reimagining of the ceiling in post-war architecture, when architects like Louis Kahn swore that he “did not want to die under a false ceiling.” While “staring at the ceiling” is often taken to represent lethargy, loss, and idle longing, it can also – as this session sets out to show – give unexpected insights into the built world and beyond.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Gianluca Belli, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Pieter Martens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Claudia Tripodi, Università degli Studi di Firenze
Flemish influences on the furnishings of Florentine residences during the Renaissance
Alicia Rojas Costa, Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Architectural dialogues in Hans Memling’s Last Judgment Triptych
Giulia Ceriani Sebregondi, Università della Campania ‘Luigi Vanvitelli’
Venetian eyes on northern architecture: Leonardo Donà dalle Rose’s embassy to Vienna (1577)
Giordano Ocelli, Independent researcher
Material consistency and gothic legacy in the baroque renovation project of San Martino al Cimino (1646-1653)
While much has been written about the negative reception of gothic architecture in Renaissance Italy, the positive appreciation there of the architectural culture of northern Europe has scarcely been investigated. Yet there are manifold indications that the first-hand experience of the architecture, cities and ways of living in northern Europe elicited appreciative responses from Italian travellers, merchants, architects and patrons. This is particularly evident for regions such as Flanders that were intensely travelled by Italian merchants fascinated by the fine artworks and luxury objects produced there. This session aims to explore to what extent not only the arts from the north (Belozerskaya 2002, Nuttall 2004) but also its architecture was positively appreciated south of the Alps.
We are not only interested in the favourable appraisal of the formal vocabulary associated with the gothic style, but more broadly in the reception of a foreign architectural culture, as expressed in writings, interior decorations and manners of dwelling, or in fictitious architectures imagined in paintings and prints. For example, many interiors in Renaissance Florence were decorated with Flemish objects, including tapestries or paintings depicting northern, gothic buildings, as in Hans Memling’s Last Judgement triptych for Angelo Tani’s chapel in the Badia Fiesolana.
The adherence to gothic architecture in Renaissance and Baroque Italy has already been studied for specific contexts, such as Venice, Milan, and Southern Italy, nuancing the opposition of “Gothic vs. Classic” (Wittkower 1974). Yet the well-known criticisms by Filarete, Vasari, Raphael and others of the so-called maniera tedesca still overshadow the more appreciative comments on the architettura oltremontana by writers such the humanist Enea Silvio Piccolomini, even though studies on the phenomenon of “Renaissance Gothic” (Chatenet & De Jonge 2011, Kavaler 2012) have convincingly challenged the conventional view inherited from Vasari in which the late gothic in northern Europe is seen as inferior or retrograde in comparison with the new Italianate all’antica style.
Building on this historiography, we invite papers that shed new light on the appreciation and possible impact in Italy of gothic architecture from northern Europe or elsewhere. How was this region’s architectural culture understood, or misunderstood? Which qualities, positive or negative, were associated with its manners of building and dwelling? Was the northern gothic perceived as inherently different from the local gothic which persisted in projects such as Ghiberti’s sacristy in Santa Trinita in Florence or Filarete’s Ospedale in Milan? Papers may focus on all aspects of architectural culture, including formal and constructional aspects, interior decorations and manners of living, and the fortuna critica of northern treatises in Italy. They may consider travelling patrons, architects, and engineers, as well as other vehicles for the import of foreign architectural ideas, such as texts, drawings, building materials, and paintings depicting architecture.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Joseph Bedford, Virginia Tech
Alex Maymind, University of Minnesota
Peggy Deamer, Yale University
Theory and/or History
Dora Epstein Jones, University of Texas at Austin
All Too Well, or the Re-emergence of “Discipline” in the Second Decade
Reinhold Martin, Columbia University
Political Theory: Aesthetics and Architecture after 9/11
Alessandro Toti, University of Westminster
Tafuri and the Tafurian Left and Right: Eclectic Legacies of Marxism in 21st-Century Theory of Architecture
As we move into the second half of the third decade of the 21st century it is time to start writing the first chapter in the history of 21st century architecture theory, addressing the events, people, places, institutions, artifacts, documents, and debates, that characterized the recent history of ideas that have shaped the production of the built environment. This session calls simultaneously for two intersecting things. Firstly, it calls for a focus on the history of theory, something that is rarely given space in meetings of architectural historians. Secondly, it calls for a focus on the history of the more recent past, something which historians are reluctant to address.
When Hanno-Walter Kruft, published his monumental History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present in 1985 and Harry Francis Mallgrave published his equally monumental, Modern Architectural Theory: A Historical Survey, 1673–1968 in 2005, they could not foresee the discourses and events that would unfold in the first decades of the new millennium. And while we have a consolidated history of architectural theory going back millennium, given to us by these historians, we have only a very sketchy understanding of the developments in architectural theory in that last quarter of a century.
The same distance now separates us from such horizons as 9/11, the dot.com bubble, the Iraq war, as separated the modern movement from the generation of historians of the 1960s who wrote the first comprehensive histories of modern architecture. The session asks historians to treat the 21st century with historical distance, even though it is still within living memory.
Papers might address the history of ideas about such matters as theories of architectural representation, drawing and computation; philosophies of perception; discourses of race, gender and disability; discourses of affect, mood, sensation and atmosphere; debates about the critical and the projective; the phenomenon of starchitecture and iconic building; parametricism; digital fabrication; architecture’s relationship to capitalism; theories of surfaces, skins and envelopes; debates about autonomy; theories of the role of culture, tradition and meaning in architecture; the history of architecture’s relationship to phenomenology; the turn to preservation and adaptive reuse; the activist turn in architectural design culture; the material turn; contemporary post-digital aesthetics in architecture; post-internet culture; speculative realist philosophy and Object Oriented Ontology; discourses of care, repair, and maintenance; theories of Labor, Work, and the organization of the architectural profession; concepts of climate, planitarity, non-extractive architecture, and carbon form; Automation and BIM, Artificial Intelligence and Big Data.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Robin Hartanto Honggare, National University of Singapore
Amy Y.T. Chang, Harvard University
Sim Hinman Wan, Texas Tech University
Dutch Batavia’s Chinese Hospital: A Diasporic Locus and the Colonial Imaginary
Marie Ngiam, University of Oslo
Fortifying ‘empire’: Buildings, materiality and transimperial contestations in early modern Southeast Asia (1600-1800)
Lawrence Chua, Syracuse University
Sovereign Facades: Museum Architecture and the Transimperial Production of Colonial Time and Territory
Amanda Achmadi, University Melbourne; Paul Walker, University of Melbourne
Changing Architectural Geographies of a Colonial Enterprise: KPM in Sydney and Singapore
Carolyn Birdsall, University of Amsterdam
Transimperial and Transwar Perspectives on Radio Architecture in Japan and Southeast Asia
Recent works by Amanda Achmadi, Paul Walker, and Prita Meier have brought attention to the connected architectural histories of empires, while Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Ines G. Županov, and Sidh Losa Mendiratta have opened up new directions in thinking about persistence, assimilation, competition, and contact between new colonial entrants to the Indian Ocean and pre-existing powers in highly desired trade zones. Yet much remains to be explored regarding how architecture shaped or became implicated in transimperial interactions, a topic for which Southeast Asia is a particularly productive space of examination.
During the heyday of colonialism, many imperial powers, including the Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, US, and Japanese empires, mobilized their military and economic arms to claim and exploit different parts of Southeast Asia. They did not operate in isolation. Empires communicated, collaborated, and collided with each other as well as with local rulers, their transimperial contacts shaping the lives of millions of people.
State officers negotiated imperial boundaries across both land and water and fought over overlapping territorial claims, conceiving agreements, such as the Spanish-Portuguese Treaty of Saragossa in 1529 and the Anglo-Dutch Treaties of 1870–1871, that influenced the demarcation of borders. Yet those lines were not rigid walls: corporate and financial transactions involved traders and companies across colonial territories, resulting in the construction of ports, offices, markets, and other intersecting economic, administrative, and intangible spaces that produced encounters among people from different countries and empires. The development of the shipping and aviation industries in the early twentieth century intensified the flows of people and goods in the region. This simultaneously encouraged colonial tourism, humanitarian work, missionizing activities, and scientific networks. All of these involved laymen and professionals from neighboring empires working for multi-national collaborations in corporate, governmental, educational, or scientific enterprises, creating ideological, technological, and epistemological exchanges and networks.
However, transimperial interactions were not always cooperative. Power takeovers, such as the British invasion of Java in 1811, the US acquisition of the Philippines in 1898, or the Japanese occupation of British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies between 1942 and 1945, produced military zones and carceral spaces, including internment camps and prisons, as well as creating parallel spaces of exile and displacement, and networks of resistance or rivalry that extended beyond claimed spaces. While the indentured labor system, which powered economic developments across colonies, hinged on transitory sites that interpenetrated and stitched together discontinuous territories, such as labor recruitment offices in China, the Straits Settlements, and Java, and migration and quarantine stations at work destinations, which often involved carceral logics and exploitative operations of restriction and surveillance.
These examples bring us to the challenge of conceptualizing architecture that exceeds empire. This session calls for papers that discuss transimperial contact spaces and collision zones in Southeast Asia from the 16th to the 20th centuries. We invite works that investigate social, political, financial, cultural, technological, material, and other aspects of transimperial contact and collision, foregrounding buildings and environments that facilitated exchange, encounter, and collaboration; or which constituted sites of overlapping jurisdictional and territorial claims. We seek to foster a conversation on approaches, theories, issues, and case studies that bring new perspectives to our understanding of colonial architecture, especially as it concerns transimperial interactions.
Chairs and Contact Details:
Martina Frank, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Myriam Pilutti Namer, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
Gökhan Okumuş; Ayşe Güliz Bilgin, METU (Middle East Technical University); Gerdy Verschuure-Stuip (TU Delft)
Cultural Landscapes in Flux: Menderes (Maeander) River as a Living Mediator - Initiator, Generator, Transformer and Re-Constructor - of Landscape and Built Evironment
Gregor Kalas, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
Publicly Accessible Clean, Flowing Water at Rome’s Late Antique Charity Centers
Gianmario Guidarelli, University of Padua
Water and Space in Western Monastic Architecture (7th-18th Centuries)
David Karmon, College of the Holy Cross
Soil, water, and mobility in Renaissance Venice
Jennifer Ferng, University of Sydney
Caring for Sea Country: Yuin Nation's Pursuit of Native Title
This session investigates the multifaceted role of water ‒ whether seas, rivers, lakes, lagoons, or artificial basins ‒ as a crucial element in shaping architecture and urbanism. Spanning the period from Antiquity to the Modern Age, prior to the Industrial Revolution, it focuses on the Mediterranean region and its sub-basins, such as the Adriatic Sea, while also welcoming broader geographical perspectives and comparative analyses. Water is examined not merely as a practical resource or scenographic medium but as a dynamic ecological force and a cornerstone of material culture that has shaped human interaction with the built environment across time and space.
The session foregrounds the relevance of ecological theory as a lens to understand historical engagements with water. Ecological theory emphasizes the interconnectedness of natural and human systems, inviting a reassessment of how architecture and urbanism have adapted to and co-evolved with aquatic environments. Recognizing water as an active agent within ecological systems ‒ rather than merely a backdrop ‒ allows for a deeper comprehension of historical architectural practices as complex environmental adaptations.
Through a variety of sources ‒ including historical drawings, cartography, treatises, architectural plans, digital media, and photography ‒ the session explores the cultural, technical, and environmental dimensions of water’s integration into architecture. Key questions include: How has water served as an ecological mediator, influencing architectural design and urban planning across different historical and cultural contexts? How have communities leveraged water’s physical and symbolic properties to negotiate the interplay between natural and built environments? How can ecological theory reshape our interpretation of the historical built environment in light of contemporary environmental challenges?
The session highlights Venice as a paradigmatic case where the inseparable relationship between water and architecture is most visible. The city’s Grand Canal palaces and mainland villas illustrate how waterways shaped economic, cultural, and urban frameworks, demonstrating water’s centrality to the material and symbolic organization of space. Venice itself can be understood as a complex ecological system, where natural and human-made environments are interwoven. Its continuous negotiation with water across centuries connects practices rooted in Antiquity with innovations that shaped the Medieval and Modern Age, offering a unique model of adaptive resilience and environmental integration. In addition, comparative perspectives, such as Lisbon’s engagement with the Tagus River, Edo’s (Tokyo’s) canal networks, and New Amsterdam’s (New York’s) waterfront spaces, underscore water’s role as both a vital resource and a driver of urban form across different cultures and periods. By interpreting the relationship with water through the prism of ecological theory, the session highlights how understanding past interactions between natural forces and built environments can enhance strategies to preserve heritage today while promoting sustainable practices attuned to ecological realities.
Selected Literature
Ammerman, A. J., 2003. Venice before the Grand Canal. Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, 2003, 48, 141–158.
Ciriacono, S., 2006. Building on Water: Venice, Holland, and the Construction of the European Landscape in Early Modern Times. New York; Oxford : Berghahn Books.
Kassler-Taub, E., 2019. Building with Water: The Rise of the Island-City in the Early Modern Mediterranean. Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1 June 2019; 78 (2): 145–166. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/jsah.2019.78.2.145
Merrill, E.M. and Giamarelos, S., 2019. From the Pantheon to the Anthropocene: Introducing Resilience in Architectural History. Architectural Histories, 7(1), 7. DOI: http://doi.org/10.5334/ah.406
Morton, T., 2009. Ecology without Nature. Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard University Press.
Morshed, A.Z 2024. Water as a Disciplinary Challenge in Architectural History. Water Hist 16, 1–20. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12685-024-00342-9
