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CCSA Talks: An Assemblage of ANY Oppositions: A Quest for Autonomy and Criticality in Late 20th-Century Architectural Theory

06.05.2023

An Assemblage of ANY Oppositions: A Quest for Autonomy and Criticality in Late 20th-Century Architectural Theory

 

Ehsan Kakhani’s talk focuses on the critical period of architectural theory spanning from the late 1960s to the end of the 20th century. During this period, many architects and theorists made efforts to acknowledge the critical capabilities of architecture. The discussion of architecture’s criticality brought up the previously raised issue of autonomy in architecture. Three periodicals—Oppositions, Assemblage, and Any—led the discussion of these two concepts. This talk will examine the different interpretations of two concepts presented in three publications as well as the debates that have arisen regarding their relationship. To gain a better understanding of the post-critical period, it may be helpful to have a comprehension of the history of autonomy and criticality in architectural theory during the latter part of the 20th century.

 

Bio:
Ehsan Kakhani is a PhD candidate in architecture at Shahid Beheshti University. He is an architect (2014) and a Master of Architectural History (2017) graduate. He is currently finishing a doctoral thesis on the history of autonomy and criticality in architectural theory in American journals of the late 20th century. In 2022, as a recipient of an excellence scholarship from Shahid Beheshti University, he was a visiting researcher in the department of Architecture and Built Environment at Lund University.

 

This CCSA Talk takes place via Google Meets and will be later available on the CCSA YouTube-Channel.

In order to get the link to attend this session, please contact ortiz@kunst.uni-frankfurt.de

 

CCSA TALKS 2023

11.04.2023

Das Center for Critical Studies in Architecture stellt aktuelle Forschungsarbeiten und Veröffentlichungen vor und diskutiert sie mit Gästen.

The Center for Critical Studies in Architecture presents current research projects as well as publications and discusses them with guests.

“What’s in an atmosphere? Emotions and urban atmospheres in late-nineteenth century London”

Cigdem Talu, McGill University, Canada
Moderation: Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Goethe University Frankfurt.

 

“Biocultural City”

Rob Boddice, Tampere University, Finland
Moderation: Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Goethe University Frankfurt.

 

June 19, 18h (CET)

“An Assemblage of ANY Oppositions: A Quest for Autonomy and Criticality in Late 20th-Century Architectural Theory”

Ehsan Kakhani, Shahid Beheshti University, Iran
Moderation: Frederike Lausch, Technical University of Darmstadt

 

CCSA Talks takes place via Zoom and will be later available on the CCSA YouTube-Channel.

CCSA Talks: Biocultural City

11.04.2023

Nikolas Rose and Des Fitzgerald begin their recent book, The Urban Brain, with the observation that ‘human neurobiology, today, requires us to think of a dynamic interplay in which human bodies and human environments constrain each other, mark each other, intermingle in an awkward, shuffling, embrace.’ What this means, for historians, is at the heart of my critical theoretical overview of the challenges and prospects for the further development of the relationship between architectural and urban history and the histories of emotions, senses, and experience. The biocultural dynamic is not only about constraint and the making of impressions; it is not only an awkward dance; it is also a productive, constructive dynamic; and in those times and places where everything moves as if so effortlessly, as if so naturally, the dynamic can appear deceptively simple, graceful, and even invisible. I want to test the historiographical validity of Rose and Fitzgerald’s already radically interdisciplinary initiative, situating it within ongoing historiographical challenges concerning intersubjective and collective emotions and experiences, and the problems of operationalizing the history of lived experience.

Bio:

Rob Boddice, PhD, FRHistS, is Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences, Tampere University. He has previously held long-term positions at the Centre for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and at the Languages of Emotion Excellence Cluster at Freie Universitaet Berlin. He is the author/editor of thirteen books, including Knowing Pain: A History of Sensation, Emotion, and Experience (Polity, 2023), Emotion, Sense, Experience (with Mark Smith) (Cambridge UP, 2020) A History of Feelings (Reaktion, 2019), and The History of Emotions (Manchester UP, 2018). This event is moderated by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Goethe University Frankfurt.

CCSA Talks has been conceived as a platform to present current research projects as well as publications and discusses them with guests. The sessions will take place online via Zoom and will be held in English.

Register here in advance for the CCSA Talks

 

CCSA Talks: What’s in an atmosphere? Emotions and urban atmospheres in late-nineteenth century London

11.04.2023

What’s in an atmosphere? Emotions and urban atmospheres in late-nineteenth century London

The figurative meaning of atmosphere, invoking concepts like ambiance, mood, aura, and milieu dates back to the early nineteenth century. Currently defined as spatialized emotions by philosophers such as Gernot Böhme and Tonino Griffero, atmospheres gained much traction in scholarship in recent years as mediated shared affect between the observer and the observed. This talk suggests that by bringing the history of emotions and its methodologies into the study of atmospheres, we can complicate the axiom of atmospheres as spatialized emotions, moving from a principally conceptual realm towards a history of atmospheres. I attempt this in the context of late nineteenth-century London, focusing on the concept of urban atmospheres in the writings of women writers and journalists. I argue that women’s writing in fin-de-siècle London represents a deviation from other texts invoking atmospheric conceptions at the time by subverting the direction of the shared affect between observer (writer) and the observed (the city) from the projection of a writer’s feelings onto space to a perceptive process where the city’s emotional undercurrents are collected and collectivized in writing.

Cigdem Talu is a researcher and PhD student at the School of Architecture at McGill University in Montreal. Her dissertation focuses on women’s urban experience in late-Victorian London, the concept of urban atmospheres, the history of feelings, and urban travel writing. Her research is supported by the Joseph Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She works as an archival researcher and most recently was the archival researcher of the architecture documentary film City Dreamers. She holds B.Arch, M.Arch, and post-professional M.Arch degrees from Politecnico di Milano and McGill University.

This event is moderated by Sara Honarmand Ebrahimi, Goethe University Frankfurt.

CCSA Talks has been conceived as a platform to present current research projects as well as publications and discusses them with guests. The sessions will take place online via Zoom and will be held in English.

Register here in advance for the CCSA Talks

 

Radical Pedagogies: Institution and/or Resistance

05.10.2022

6th CCSA Talk 22/23

13.02.2023, 6 pm [ENG]
BEATRIZ COLOMINA (Princeton University), IGNACIO G. GALÁN (Barnard College, Columbia University), EVANGELOS KOTSIORIS (Museum of Modern Art), ANNA-MARIA MEISTER (Technical University of Darmstadt)
»Radical Pedagogies: Institution and/or Resistance«

In the decades after World War II, new forms of learning transformed architectural education. These radical experiments sought to upend disciplinary foundations and challenge architectural discourse, education, and practice. On the occasion of the publication of Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022), a far-reaching compendium of more than one hundred global experiments in architectural education, please join us for a conversation with editors Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister. We will discuss how these provocative projects from the last century did not only shake the foundations of the discipline, but also raise provocative questions about architecture and its pedagogies. The experiments include the adaptation of Bauhaus pedagogy as a means of “unlearning” under the conditions of decolonization in Africa; a movement to design for “every body,” including the disabled, by architecture students and faculty at the University of California, Berkeley; the founding of a support network for women interested in the built environment, regardless of their academic backgrounds; and a design studio in the USSR that offered an alternative to the widespread functionalist approach in Soviet design. Viewed through their dissolution and afterlife as well as through their founding stories, these projects from the last century raise provocative questions about architecture’s role in the new century. 

Beatriz Colomina
Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture, Princeton School of Architecture; Founding Director, Media and Modernity Program, Princeton University

Ignacio G. Galán
Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, Barnard+Columbia Colleges

Evangelos Kotsioris
Assistant Curator, Department of Architecture and Design, The Museum of Modern Art

Anna-Maria Meister
Assistant Professor for Architecture Theory and Science, Technical University of Darmstadt

CCSA Talks takes place via Zoom and will be later available on the CCSA YouTube-Channel.