An Inter-Institutional Platform
for PhDs, PostDocs and ECRs in
Architectural History and Theory,
Landscape and the City
for PhDs, PostDocs and ECRs in
Architectural History and Theory,
Landscape and the City
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Regular Talks
︎︎︎Online Sessions Link︎︎︎
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︎︎︎Online Sessions Link︎︎︎
5 May 2026
10:00 AM EDT / 4:00 PM CEST
Unsettling the Typology:
Mappila Muslim Women’s Reimaginings of Gendered Domestic Space
(Kerala, India)
AKMA NAZAR
University of Westminster
Respondent: Mehwish Abid, McGill University
University of Westminster
Respondent: Mehwish Abid, McGill University
Routine scene in a Mappila home (author’s house) - the father casually occupies the veranda, while the mother cautiously retreats behind a wall, negotiating privacy and visibility from the street beyond - a subtle demonstration of tensions and conflicts between gender and space.
This research examines how gender is embedded in the contemporary (1980s-present) domestic typology of Mappila Muslim homes in Malabar, Kerala, focusing on the production and negotiation of domestic space through women’s perspectives. Architectural historiography on the Mappila community has overwhelmingly privileged the sacred or monumental (particularly mosque architecture) while leaving the architectures of everyday life underexplored. Where domesticity is addressed, scholarship has tended to emphasise traditional aristocratic residences, overlooking proletarian and contemporary homes that constitute the majority experience. This neglect reflects a broader tendency in architectural discourse to privilege the public realm over the private, rendering ordinary domestic environments analytically marginal.
My project responds to this gap by exploring how Mappila women, particularly homemakers, tactically and subversively exercise spatial agency within contemporary homes shaped by Islamic design principles, regional syncretic spatial practices and modernist architectural ideals. It unpacks ways in which these domestic spaces respond, or fail to respond, to women’s personal, social, cultural, spiritual, and religious needs.
Methodologically, the project adopts a relational autoethnographic approach combining family research and ‘friendship as method’, using spatial analysis guided by oral histories from women in my family and personal network as critical entry points into wider architectural questions. By foregrounding orality as an architectural research method, it challenges masculinist narratives of the ‘home as haven’ and instead situates women as active repositories of architectural knowledge. A feminist psychoanalytic lens enables me to map women’s affective and spatial desires, thei negotiations of domestic spaces/boundaries, and the ‘leftover’ or unarticulated dimensions of dwelling absent from typological discourse.
Through one case study, my presentation will demonstrate the gendered spatial framework of these homes (authorship, spatial layout and use, homemaking practices, etc.) and how Mappila women, through everyday practices and performances, interrupt and reimagine their prevailing domestic typology. In doing so, it reconceptualises domestic typology not as a static cultural form, but as a contested terrain of spatial agency, contributing to broader debates in architectural historiography and feminist spatial theory.
My project responds to this gap by exploring how Mappila women, particularly homemakers, tactically and subversively exercise spatial agency within contemporary homes shaped by Islamic design principles, regional syncretic spatial practices and modernist architectural ideals. It unpacks ways in which these domestic spaces respond, or fail to respond, to women’s personal, social, cultural, spiritual, and religious needs.
Methodologically, the project adopts a relational autoethnographic approach combining family research and ‘friendship as method’, using spatial analysis guided by oral histories from women in my family and personal network as critical entry points into wider architectural questions. By foregrounding orality as an architectural research method, it challenges masculinist narratives of the ‘home as haven’ and instead situates women as active repositories of architectural knowledge. A feminist psychoanalytic lens enables me to map women’s affective and spatial desires, thei negotiations of domestic spaces/boundaries, and the ‘leftover’ or unarticulated dimensions of dwelling absent from typological discourse.
Through one case study, my presentation will demonstrate the gendered spatial framework of these homes (authorship, spatial layout and use, homemaking practices, etc.) and how Mappila women, through everyday practices and performances, interrupt and reimagine their prevailing domestic typology. In doing so, it reconceptualises domestic typology not as a static cultural form, but as a contested terrain of spatial agency, contributing to broader debates in architectural historiography and feminist spatial theory.
***
Swiss Safe Space Imaginaries: Spatial Archetypes of Stability,
Abundance, and Racialized Complicity
Abundance, and Racialized Complicity
KHENSANI JURCZOK-DE KLERK
ETH Zürich
Respondent: Sarah Moses, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
ETH Zürich
Respondent: Sarah Moses, Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Yearnings for Homeplace, from Within the Nuclear Family House, 2024, collage.
This sub-chapter interrogates the production of “safe space” in Switzerland, examining how safety is spatially constructed through national imaginaries of stability, neutrality, and abundance. While the notion of safe space emerges from social movements as a demand for protection and recognition, in the Swiss context it is recast as a cultural and spatial ideal embedded in everyday environments. This ideal is sustained not only through political discourse, but through recurring spatial archetypes tha render safety visible, legible, and seemingly self-evident. Focusing on two such archetypes–the countryside and the domestic kitchen cupboard – the sub-chapter traces how safety is socially and materially staged across territorial and domestic scales. The countryside, often imagined as pastoral, orderly, and self-contained, operates as a site of regulated visibility and social normativity, where belonging is structured through racialized and gendered expectations. The kitchen cupboard, emblematic of domestic abundance, extends this logic through practices of consumption, embedding global histories of extraction, racialized representation, and economic inequality within the intimate routines of everyday life.
Drawing on oral histories of Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, the founder of the Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (1993–2010), the analysis foregrounds Black feminist perspectives as a form of situated knowledge through which these spatial conditions become critically legible. Her accounts reveal how spaces that signify safety at a national level can simultaneously produce isolation, invisibility, and conditional belonging. Rather than treating safety as a neutral or universally accessible condition, the sub-chapter positions it as a spatial project structured through processes of selection, normalization, and exclusion. In so doing, it unsettles the myth of Swiss safe space and advances a socio-spatial
understanding of safety that recognizes its uneven distribution and its entanglement with racialized and gendered forms of violence.
Drawing on oral histories of Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, the founder of the Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (1993–2010), the analysis foregrounds Black feminist perspectives as a form of situated knowledge through which these spatial conditions become critically legible. Her accounts reveal how spaces that signify safety at a national level can simultaneously produce isolation, invisibility, and conditional belonging. Rather than treating safety as a neutral or universally accessible condition, the sub-chapter positions it as a spatial project structured through processes of selection, normalization, and exclusion. In so doing, it unsettles the myth of Swiss safe space and advances a socio-spatial
understanding of safety that recognizes its uneven distribution and its entanglement with racialized and gendered forms of violence.
19 May 2026
8:00 AM EDT / 2:00 PM CEST
Architectures of Anticipation: Illustrated with Three Acts from Wartime Turkey
ELIF KAYMAZ
Middle East Technical University
Respondent: Pinar Sezginalp, Bilkent University
Marked with projected defensive sites, the 1:100,000 map of Mersin and its surroundings, 1941. ATASE Military History Archives, 110-9-1-14 (4/0/113)
Architectures of anticipation names how Turkey, officially neutral yet deeply entangled in the Second World War, reshaped its environments between 1935 and 1945. The expectation of conflict generated infrastructures, standards, and surveys, and redistributed responsibilities across institutions, experts, and publics. This future-oriented mindset materialized in ports and trenches, in manuals and gas-mask drills, and in the atmospheres and vulnerabilities of cities. The talk examines three acts through which this orientation becomes visible. In the south, army sergeant Vecihi Akın’s twenty-one-day field notes and sketches, produced while translating for a visiting British general, capture the routines of coastal defense under neutrality. Moving from decisions on defending hills to the social rhythms of travel, his records reveal intertwined practices of territorial assessment, diplomacy, and Allied information-gathering. In Istanbul, journalist Nusret Sefa Coşkun’s series on the Byzantine cisterns revisited the city’s underground at a time when shelter construction stalled and finances were strained. His reports on damp vaults, blocked passages, and unexpected capacities reframed these spaces as practical assets, turning the subterranean past into a prospective infrastructure of protection later echoed by foreign experts and municipal decisions. At the Red Crescent’s gas-mask factory, chemist Nuri Refet Korur’s manuals, journal writings, and experiments chart preparation at the scale of the body. The factory’s respirator production, largely undertaken by women workers, paired with Korur’s technical work to form a laboratory of design, discipline, and care, shaping new domestic expertise around toxicity and protection. These acts show how futures of destruction were made workable in the present: by mobilizing bureaucracies, furnishing environments, and inscribing routines onto bodies. They reveal communicative, territorial, organizational, and epistemological practices through which environments became governable under crisis, authority and labor shifted, and fear and hope informed spatial imagination. This framework clarifies how projected futures of war, climate, or displacement, reorder the present and why such dynamics matter for architectural history.
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From Fences to Statutes: Privacy, Property, and Self-Governance in Post-Detonation Los Alamos, 1955-1965
LEALLA SOLOMON
Princeton University
Respondent: Heather Jahrling, Princeton University
The Zia Company Electric Utility, 1961,
Cowan Collection,
Los Alamos Historical Society Archives, Los Alamos, New Mexico, Community,
Box 6,
Folder 36. Histories of American domesticity regard privacy as a building’s relationship to the exterior. Discourses of model suburban living have elevated Levittown as the postwar model of American living, effectively marking privacy through the typology of the suburban house and its appurtenances. The fence, lawn, shaded windows, curtains, and acoustic measures have established themselves as markers of privacy in modernity, equating privacy with the ability to separate the individual from the adjacent exterior. This presentation seeks to challenge the canonical presumption by interrogating the urban planning of Los Alamos—the infamous atomic energy town—after the detonation. It contends that under the mantle of “disposal plans” ( the Atomic Energy Commission’s federal plan to privatize Manhattan Project towns and transform them into self-governed entities), the Atomic Energy Commission reinvented American privacy and individuality. Through an extensive archival investigation of reports, studies, recommendations, official letters, and community registers produced between 1955 and 1965 in the attempt to safeguard and promote domestic nuclear production through the creation of the town’s “self-governance,” I mobilize the notion of the private from the realms of domestic design to urban planning, management, and assertion of control. In this presentation, I will show how previous privacy-generating entities, rooted in domestic architectural settings, morphed into a legal and economic mechanism that prioritized administrative and interiorized separation from the one exhibited to the outside. With an emphasis on property deeds and transfers, the ability to separate shared utilities and mortgage payments (both between families and between citizen entities and the federal government), and the simple legal definition transfer of a typology (from “multi-family house” to “single family house”), this presentation seeks to mobilize architectural privacy into the realms of law, governance, and politics. Reconfiguring privacy’s material assumptions, I challenge how privacy is thought of, conceived, practiced, and performed in the postwar world.
Forthcoming - TBA
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
What’s Wrong with the Rural House?
On Realism and Myth in Giuseppe Pagano’s Photography
JOLANDA DEVALLE
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Respondent: Mireille Roddier, University of Michigan
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Giuseppe Pagano, Haystack in the Roman Agro, 1935.
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The Architecture of the Making of the Author
SEVGİ TÜRKKAN
Istanbul Technical University
Respondent: Mireille Roddier, University of Michigan
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The architecture of the making of the author: Tracing the pedagogy of the "loge" in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition.
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
What’s Wrong with the Rural House?
On Realism and Myth in Giuseppe Pagano’s Photography
JOLANDA DEVALLE
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Respondent: Mireille Roddier, University of Michigan
Giuseppe Pagano, Haystack in the Roman Agro, 1935.
This paper reconsiders Giuseppe Pagano’s Exhibition on Rural Architecture, presented at the VI Milan Triennale in 1936, a project built around an unprecedented photographic campaign of rural dwelling across Italy, much of it shot by Pagano himself. In architectural historiography, the exhibition has long been hailed as an “anthropological inquiry,” a paradigm shift away from stylistic canons and capital-A Architecture toward humble and overlooked every-day environments. After 1945, this reading became closely bound to Pagano’s own tragic trajectory—his break from fascism in 1943, participation in the Resistance, and his death in Mauthausen in 1945. Through a redemptive lens, postwar leftist scholarship interpreted the rural exhibition as a profoundly ethical endeavor: a realist search for architecture’s collective foundations, an antidote to fascist rhetoric, an early precursor to Neorealist sensibilities. Interpretations which collectively elevated Pagano and his work as figures of critical resistance, a narrative this paper seeks to revisit and complicate.
In light of today’s renewed yearnings for the so-called vernacular and rural imaginaries, this paper approaches Pagano’s exhibition through a different and seldom discussed lens: his 1939 photographic sequence and photobook Il Covo, depicting Mussolini’s editorial office—“the lair”—the mythologized birthplace of fascism. Viewed alongside Il Covo, Pagano’s celebrated “anthropological” inquiry reveals a more ambivalent aesthetic: a double movement in which realism and myth operate simultaneously. Through a close reading of photographs, his writings in Casabella, and the catalogue Architettura rurale italiana, the paper argues that Pagano’s mode of realism isolated and abstracted fragments of the real—neutralizing class conflicts and contingency—to produce archetypal, almost mythical forms and gestures. This reframing complicates his status as precursor to postwar Neorealism and situates Pagano’s visual practice within recent philosophical reflections on fascism’s capacity to transform “reality” through myth.
In light of today’s renewed yearnings for the so-called vernacular and rural imaginaries, this paper approaches Pagano’s exhibition through a different and seldom discussed lens: his 1939 photographic sequence and photobook Il Covo, depicting Mussolini’s editorial office—“the lair”—the mythologized birthplace of fascism. Viewed alongside Il Covo, Pagano’s celebrated “anthropological” inquiry reveals a more ambivalent aesthetic: a double movement in which realism and myth operate simultaneously. Through a close reading of photographs, his writings in Casabella, and the catalogue Architettura rurale italiana, the paper argues that Pagano’s mode of realism isolated and abstracted fragments of the real—neutralizing class conflicts and contingency—to produce archetypal, almost mythical forms and gestures. This reframing complicates his status as precursor to postwar Neorealism and situates Pagano’s visual practice within recent philosophical reflections on fascism’s capacity to transform “reality” through myth.
***
The Architecture of the Making of the Author
SEVGİ TÜRKKAN
Istanbul Technical University
Respondent: Mireille Roddier, University of Michigan
The architecture of the making of the author: Tracing the pedagogy of the "loge" in the Ecole des Beaux-Arts tradition.
The late 20th century saw the intensification of attempts that expose the author as a theoretical, traditional and disciplinary construct in its complex socio-cultural entanglements. This Post-doctoral research, additionally, aims to take on a spatial perspective in the construction of the author-figure, focusing on one of the most formative chapters in the history of architectural education with continuing reverberations today.
When the seminal École des Beaux-Arts was re-established in its new complex on Rue Bonaparte in 1820, “Bâtiments des Loges” (The-Loges-Building) was the first building to be completed and used in 1824. “Loges” can be described as individual cubicles aligned on a corridor, divided by rigid walls, strictly regulated and kept under probation by guardians in order to isolate students physically and socially from the outside world and each other during the periods of architectural competitions (ranging from 2 hours to 3 months), including the prestigious Prix de Rome. Inherited from Academie Royal D’Architecture, loges were central to the pedagogy and curriculum of the École (Levine, Middleton, 1984). To counter the anonymity in the ateliers, loges assured competitors an uninterrupted space, allowing them to manifest their personal skills with a guarantee of claiming the credits in person. Although lesser published, and was abandoned after the École’s dissemination in 1968, this tiny spatio-pedagogic unit has been profound in maintaining the École des Beaux-Arts system and culture, which served as the prevalent model for institutionalized architectural education 19th century onwards.
A brief account of this lasting spatio-pedagogic tradition attempts to pin down the often-mystified production of the author in spatial lieu, revealing the socio-spatial mechanisms enabled and triggered by its architecture: the conception of creativity and isolation, the rituals of competition and surveillance, the stories of accomplishments and misbehavior.
Through a selection of drawings, postcards, administrative documents and letters from 19th and 20th century archive materials, the study will display and discuss a brief account of the “loges” as a pedagogic instrument, a cultural incubator and an authorship inscribing mechanism.
When the seminal École des Beaux-Arts was re-established in its new complex on Rue Bonaparte in 1820, “Bâtiments des Loges” (The-Loges-Building) was the first building to be completed and used in 1824. “Loges” can be described as individual cubicles aligned on a corridor, divided by rigid walls, strictly regulated and kept under probation by guardians in order to isolate students physically and socially from the outside world and each other during the periods of architectural competitions (ranging from 2 hours to 3 months), including the prestigious Prix de Rome. Inherited from Academie Royal D’Architecture, loges were central to the pedagogy and curriculum of the École (Levine, Middleton, 1984). To counter the anonymity in the ateliers, loges assured competitors an uninterrupted space, allowing them to manifest their personal skills with a guarantee of claiming the credits in person. Although lesser published, and was abandoned after the École’s dissemination in 1968, this tiny spatio-pedagogic unit has been profound in maintaining the École des Beaux-Arts system and culture, which served as the prevalent model for institutionalized architectural education 19th century onwards.
A brief account of this lasting spatio-pedagogic tradition attempts to pin down the often-mystified production of the author in spatial lieu, revealing the socio-spatial mechanisms enabled and triggered by its architecture: the conception of creativity and isolation, the rituals of competition and surveillance, the stories of accomplishments and misbehavior.
Through a selection of drawings, postcards, administrative documents and letters from 19th and 20th century archive materials, the study will display and discuss a brief account of the “loges” as a pedagogic instrument, a cultural incubator and an authorship inscribing mechanism.