Lecture series History of Art and Architecture: Lectures in January

On Tuesday, 14 January 2025, 7 p.m., the lecture series will start with the lecture "Ernst A. Plischke. Modernism as an attitude" at the main campus in Cottbus. The Chair of Architectural Theory, headed by Prof. Dr Albert Kirchengast, has secured the services of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Christoph Schnoor from the Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland (New Zealand) as a guest speaker.

The lecture will focus on Ernst A. Plischke (1903-1992), whose biographer is Schnoor - a lesser-known architect of the third generation of Austrian modernism after Loos and Josef Frank. Forced to emigrate in 1939 due to his wife's Jewish origins, he was one of the pioneers of modernism in New Zealand, and after his return - with a professorship at the Vienna School of Fine Arts (1963-73) - he became a central figure of identification in Austria, always adhering to modernism as an attitude. This will be the focus of the lecture, alongside fundamental information on this architect, who trained under Oskar Strnad and then Behrens and was deeply impressed by the design of the "Weißenhofsiedlung" - true to the theme of the series: "What are we building on?" In Schnoor's own words: "Modernism was immensely important to Ernst A. Plischke, both in his design work and in his teaching, as an attitude on which he himself, his students and society could build."

Prof. Schnoor has been teaching and researching at the Unitec Institute of Technology in Auckland since 2004. His doctoral studies focussed on Le Corbusier's earliest urban planning theories. He subsequently published many texts on this topic. This was followed by further publications on the subject of "Modernist Architecture", on the architectural historian Colin Rowe and the architect Erst Anton Plischke. He also deals with the interactions between German colonial architecture and indigenous building methods in the South Pacific.

Anyone interested is cordially invited to attend the free event at the BTU main campus in Cottbus, lecture theatre A.

Further lectures in January
each Tuesday, 7 p.m., Cottbus main campus, lecture theatre A

21 January 2025
Architecture and Archaeology
Dr Asja Müller, Freie Universität Berlin
Architecture and Visualisation IBK

28 January 2025
Fragile Foundations. Culture in War
Kateryna Stetsevych, Federal Agency for Civic Education
FG Cultural Management IBK

The Institute of History of Art and Architecture (IBK) is an interdisciplinary teaching and research network at the Faculty of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Urban Planning at BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg. The institution, which is unique in the German university landscape, brings together eight key areas under one roof: Architecture and Visualisation, Architectural Theory, History of Architecture, ArchitecturalConservation, Heritage Management, Cultural Management and History of Art are all represented at the IBK.