Lecturer: Dr. Christa Kamleithner, Albrecht Wiesener

Tuesday 3 - 4.30 pm, Begin 13 April 2021

The seminar is intended as a platform for critically assessing the preconditions and constraints of the disciplines we work in, such as art history, building history, construction history, architectural theory, or heritage studies. We take for certain that architectural conservation saves the legacies of the past, but in practice conservation often goes hand in hand with destruction. Moreover, what is meant to be universal heritage has been and is being used for deliberate political action. We take for granted the boundaries of the cultures whose artefacts we study, but those boundaries have been constructed not least by the disciplines we work in. To give just two major examples: What we assume to be “the Orient” is a construction of the Western gaze, and what we think of as “vernacular” architecture is a modern creation, created as an antithesis to modern architecture. Recent scholarship across disciplines has tackled with these and related issues, and the seminar is intended to introduce into these ongoing debates.

As it accompanies the summer lecture series of the DFG Research Training Group 1913 and the conference on “Architectures of Colonialism” (16-19 June 2021), the seminar is aimed primarily at doctoral students and postdoc-researchers of this group, but is also open to other interested doctoral students and researchers.

The online seminar starts on 13 April 2021, 3pm. Please contact christa.kamleithner@b-tu.de beforehand.

Literature, i.a.: Lucia Allais, Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, Chicago 2018; Irene Cheng, Charles L. Davis II, Mabel O. Wilson: Race and Modern Architecture. A Critical History from the Enlightenment to the Present, Pittsburgh 2020.