An Inter-Institutional Platform
for PhDs, Postdocs and ECRs in
Architectural History and Theory,
Landscape and the City

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01 December 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Dismantling Aesthetics: Lu Märten’s Emancipatory Tools for Proletarian Interiors

MIKE BILL
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt

Respondent: Anna-Maria Meister (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute)

Käthe Kollwitz, Poster of the Deutsche Heimarbeit-Ausstellung („German Outwork Exhibition“) in Berlin 1906, 1906, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main.“

Glued together, dusty, uncomfortable, impractical: the textures and material qualities of the built environment often play a central role in critical analyses of capitalism and consumption. This is especially evident in the writings of the Berlin-based author Lu Märten (1879-1970). In the early decades of the twentieth century, Märten drew from the textures of the proletarian dwelling to formulate her concept of “social aesthetics”. By placing working-class domestic space and reproductive labour at the centre of her analysis, she sought to detach “aesthetics” from its bourgeois connotations and reframe it as an emancipatory tool for women workers.

To further explore the entanglement of Märten’s “social aesthetics” and proletarian interiors, this presentation focuses on Märten’s guidebook Aesthetics and the Working Class (1912–1914) – a text which remained unpublished during her lifetime. Written for a proletaria readership, the text evaluates a wide range of everyday objects and practices - from ill-fitting women’s clothing to glued-on decoration, veneering, and ornamental stucco - while developing a critique of the expanding commodity culture directed at working-class consumers. Against the backdrop of the politicised and gendered exposure of working-class housing at the time, I argue that Märten’s guidebook offers an important historical counterpoint to conventional accounts of domestic labour. Decades before the international Wages for Housework movement, Märten identified housework - and reproductive labour more broadly - as potentially destabilising a patriarchal conception of creation. From the perspective of feminist architectural history, her work thus contributes to an understanding of architecture and the built environment as constituted not only by formal design, but also by the everyday micro-practices through which spaces are maintained, inhabited, and made liveable.

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Bodies as Method:
Architectural Pedagogies of Unlearning, 1966–1975

ELEONORA ANTONIADOU
Royal College of Art (RCA)

Respondent: Anna-Maria Meister (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max Planck Institute)

image TBD

Between 1966 and 1975, workshops, summer schools, independent schools and university initiative brought bodily action into a wider reconsideration of architectural education. Activities moved beyond the conventional studio into landscapes, streets and other everyday environments, altering how knowledge was formed and where pedagogical authority rested. The research interprets these shifts as forms of unlearning shaped through direct experience and bodily action, asking what architectural education migh take from these earlier attempts to question inherited disciplinary relations. This presentation will attempt to unfold Bodies as Method as a way of understanding how bodies became active in the production of
architectural knowledge.

The argument develops through three case studies, each reconstructed through its particular historica and institutional conditions. Global Tools connected a critique of design culture with elementary tools and direct engagement with materials. The Halprin workshops used scores to structure encounters betwee movement and environment, allowing experience to support collective reflection. At F+F in Zurich, interdisciplinary practices developed through feminist critique and changing institutional relations. Across these settings, bodily action acquired more explicit significance as part of how knowledge was produced and shared.

Archival research brings programmes and correspondence into relation with photographs, films, surviving scores and notes in order to reconstruct how these practices were organised. Particular attention is given to the way instructions shaped bodily action, alongside the forms of facilitation and access that conditioned who could enter these settings and how they became visible within the historical record.

Bringing these histories into relation allows Bodies as Method to emerge as an analytical approach to understanding how bodily action and pedagogical relations produced architectural knowledge. Bodies became methodological when action and experience were deliberately organised as part of an investigation. The knowledge that emerged was situated and relational, shaped by the bodies involved and by the conditions under which they acted.

Manazir x DocTalks

15 December 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Measuring the Sakarya River: Floods, settlements, and a dam

ASYA ECE UZMAY
Cornell University

Respondent: Sara Frikech, ETH Zurich gta

Postcard depicting the 1913 flooding of the Sakarya River in Adapazarı, Resül Narin Archive.

This paper brings the countryside to the forefront of capitalist modernization rather than treating it as its peripheral backdrop. Exploring çiftlik houses, mills, and dams alongside farmlands, riverbanks,and irrigation channels, it traces the longue durée of rural transformation from the late Ottoman Empire into the Turkish nation-state. Rather than understanding twentieth-century developmentalism as a rupture from the imperial past, it examines how Ottoman regimes of agrarian reform, land governance, environmental management, and expert knowledge continued to shape the countryside under the nation-state. In doing so, it rethinks developmentalism in the countryside as a historical, juridical, and environmental continuation of imperial projects of governing land, water, labor, and population. The first part of the paper examines Flood management infrastructure at the intersection of malaria eradication campaigns and agricultural production, particularly through rice cultivation in the lower lands of the Sakarya River. It shows how governance of health, agriculture and flooding became inseparable from migrant settlement and interventions into land, water, and rural productivity.The second part turns to the upper lands of the Sakarya River, tracing transformations from water-dependent paddy cultivation and wetland drainage to the construction of the Sarıyar Dam in 1956 and the subsequent drying of the landscape. Bringing together architects, medical and agricultural experts, engineers, migrants, and international policymakers, the paper traces how intersecting forms of expertise, labor, and governance remade the landscape. In doing so, it reads wetlands, aquifers, rivers, sediments, and dams as archives alongside imperial and state records and fiction. What emerges is an account of the countryside as a zone of translation and friction, where imperial and developmentalist regimes co-produced enduring environmental and infrastructural landscapes.

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The River and the Museum: The Making of French Mandate Cultural Order in Antakya, 1926–1939

JOELLE DEEB
University of Cambridge

Respondent: Feyza Daloğlu, Middle East Technical University

Field notes on the Antakya Museum, April 2026: the main façade from across Al-Asi and the barred gate between the museum and the river. Annotated photographs by the author.

Between 1926 and 1939, French Mandate authorities remade Antakya through the Al-Asi River. Histories of cultural policy in French Mandate Syria and Lebanon have largely told an architectural story: museums built, antiquities housed, urban plans imposed. This paper argues that in Antakya, the story runs through water. The Mandate governed culture by governing the river, a process I call hydrocultural ordering, and the Antakya Museum was its architectural consolidation.

The Princeton campaigns extracted mosaics and knowledge from the riverbank under French disciplinary authority, carried out by Antakyan labour the record barely names. René Danger's 1932 plan then partitioned the city along a sanitation line, recasting the river as a hygienic boundary between populations; when Antakyans threw their fezzes into Al-Asi in 1936, the cordon had already made the river a political stage. Michel Ecochard's museum consolidated both operations: built on expropriated riverbank land to hold what excavation had taken from the ground, it faced Al-Asi rather than the modern city, its plan and facade organised around the river that had produced its collection. Finally, the river became the border that had been rehearsing the claims that culminated in Antakya's 1939 annexation to Turkey.

The argument rests on fieldwork conducted in Antakya in 2026, including measured drawings of the museum and its riverbank ensemble, and on archival material from IFPO Beirut, the Basil Khoury Family Archive, the Aga Khan Documentation Center, Salt Research Istanbul and the OCHRE database. The museum stands today as a public library, its collection dispersed, its spatial argument intact: the ordering outlasted the political project that authorised it.

26 January 2027
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Generating Translocal Housing:
Comparative Analysis of Two Translocal Fields between Turkey and Europe

LAMIA KOCAMAN
KU Leuven

Respondent: Nitin Bathla (University of Zürich)

At the entrance to Emirdağ, a sign proudly proclaims the town as the “Capital of Diaspora,” reflecting its long-standing translocal ties with communities across Europe, particularly Ghent, Belgium.

The migrant’s experience is often intertwined with a sense of belonging to multiple places, while this is sometimes a polarizing topic, seen as hampering their integration, it offers an interesting case study to understand how migrant’s negotiate multiple belongings while being dispersed and engaged.

This presentation examines houses of two translocal communities (Ghent–Emirdağ and Stockholm–Kulu) understood as groups of people who live, both physically and virtually, across two or more places simultaneously. Their negotiations are rarely spatially analyzed within a comparative framework; studies focus predominantly on the impact of migration on the host country. This presentation addresses that gap by offering a comparative lens of the migrant house in the host country and the remittance house in the country of origin, illustrating that the connection with elsewhere is co-constitutive in shaping domestic space. Rather than treating their houses in Europe and Turkey as independent categories, it proposes to compare the houses to illustrate how they are defined by their translocality.

While the Turkish villages, Emirdağ and Kulu, have experienced depopulation, investments in remittance houses have resulted in increased housing density and a highly developed construction industry that contributes to current normative typologies. In Europe, translocal communities challenge dwelling standards through everyday practices of adaptation, “battling” with the migrant house through architectural interventions and spatial practices.

By combining ethnographic fieldwork, life-history interviews with migrant women, and architectural drawings, the presentation maps how multiple belonging is spatially expressed in migrant and remittance houses. By comparing these two houses, it asks which home-making practices, spatial knowledge and objects circulate across localities. More broadly, it explores what we can learn from the ways translocal communities shape their lives in domestic spaces across two places simultaneously.

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Return to Conflict-Affected Territories: Territorial Transformation in Rural Colombia

ALEJANDRO JARAMILLO QUINTERO
ETH ZÜRICH

Respondent: Nitin Bathla (University of Zürich)

image TBD

In Colombia, more than six decades of armed conflict have forcibly displaced over 9.2 million people, profoundly transforming the rural territories they left behind while increasing pressure on housing, infrastructure, and basic services in the urban areas where many settled.

Since the early 2000s, processes of return have been taking place across many of these conflict-affected territories. These processes are far from homogeneous: while some communities have been rebuilding their territories for more than twenty years, others are returning only now, and in many places return, new displacement, peace processes and renewed violence continue to happen simultaneously. Yet, while return has been studied from different perspectives, less is known about how rural territories are rebuilt and transformed through return, and what this means for their future.

This doctoral research investigates the conditions that allow people to inhabit and sustain life in territories affected by conflict and abandonment, and why these conditions differ across places shaped by different histories of displacement and return, accessibility, resources, collective organization, and relationships with larger territorial systems.

The research uses the vereda, a sub-municipal rural territorial unit, as a scale through which to compare different trajectories of return and territorial transformation in San Francisco, Antioquia. Combining assemblage ethnography and action research, it documents spatial conditions, actors and relations through fieldwork and mapping, while working with communities and municipal institutions to understand how these territories differ, how they connect to wider systems, and how alternative futures can be explored collectively.

The research asks whether return can become an opportunity to rethink the future of rural territories affected by conflict. It explores with communities, local organizations, and institutions how architecture can translate territorial knowledge into spatial strategies, projects, and speculative futures, responding to immediate needs while opening space to collectively explore alternative ways of sustaining and transforming rural life.

23 February 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

From Mythopoetic to Architectural Design: The “Minoan” through the Archive of Atelier 66

TASIANNA KECHRAKOU
ENSA Paris-Val de Seine, and National Technical University of Athens

Respondent: TBD

Drawing of the central courtyard, Technical University of Crete, Chania (1982). Atelier 66 Archive

This studyinvestigates how mythopoetic imaginaries can become operative within architectural design. Ratherthan approaching the relationship between cultural references and architecture through questions of formalresemblance or direct influence, it focuses on the processes through which a cultural representation istransformed, reinterpreted, and translated into architectural concepts. The question is therefore not simplyhow the “Minoan” is represented in the work of two architects connected to Crete, but how a myth, with itssymbols, can acquire a productive role within the design process.

Work in progress from my doctoral research is presented through an ongoing study of the archive of Dimitrisand Suzana Antonakakis, focusing on their recurrent references to the “Minoan” and, more specifically, to theLabyrinth. Rather than treating the “Minoan” as a stable historical reference, the research examines how it isconstructed through different forms of discourse: architectural writings, interviews, historiographicalaccounts, and the analysis of built and drawn projects. Particular attention is given to the writings of SuzanaAntonakaki and to an interview conducted with Dimitris Antonakakis in December 2025, alongside selectedworks of Atelier 66.

Methodologically, the research brings together interpretive and comparative analysis with Michel Foucault’snotion of the archive as a system of statements and George Lakoff’s understanding of metaphor as a structureof conceptual correspondences. These approaches allow the research to trace relations between culturalrepresentations and architectural concepts without reducing them to direct formal influence.

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Architecture of the Land": Louis I. Kahn's National Assembly Building Complex in
Dhaka, Bangladesh, and the Construction of National Identity

NUBRAS SAMAYEEN
Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA)

Respondent: TBD

Louis Kahn's Assembly Building Complex in Dhaka, Bangladesh by Nubras Samayeen, October 2021.

Louis I. Kahn’s (1901–74) National Assembly Building Complex (constructed 1963–82) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, provides a case study on how the built environment can help in the formation ofa nation’s identity in its postcolonial (after 1947) and postindependence (after 1971) eras. My study will investigate this process by focusing on the designed landscape that surrounds the National Assembly Building Complex. Whereas the building itself has been studied in depth by architects and historians, the landscape component of the complex, which is a part of Kahn’s design, has received negligible attention. My dissertation explores the original vision of Kahn’s design as well as the importance the complex has gained over time. By juxtaposing Kahn’s and state leaders’ original ideas about the design with the events that have granted the design a unique place in the nationalimagination, my dissertation explores three questions: (1) Why, at a critical point in Bangladesh’shistory, did the state choose Louis Kahn, an American architect, to design the principal nationalcomplex that was intended to represent the new nation’s identity? (2) How has Kahn’s landscapeevolved into a nationally renowned space for civic activities since its construction? (3) How has theparadox of the design’s manifesting both a Western/modern sensibility and a traditional Bengali sensibility operated over time in the complex’s role as a national symbol? By investigating Kahn’sthoughts on the design through archival research as well as interviews with key scholars and stakeholders, my dissertation aims to reveal the particularly pluralistic ideas that have undergirded popular thinking about both the Complex’s built environment and the nation writ large. In so doing, I explore the role that Kahn’s landscape has played in the formation of Bangladesh’s multilayeredpostcolonial identity. I examine the respective roles of landscape and architecture in constructing thecountry’s national identity. On the whole the research looks at the homogenizing force of modernity.

9 March 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Architecture from the Backend: UMPLIS and Planning Information Systems in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1960–1990

MARLON BROWNSWORD
School of Architecture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

School of Cybernetics, Australian National University, Canberra

Respondent: TBD

In a letter to planning theorist Gerhard Fehl, gta founder Adolf Max Vogt warned of the “threatening possibilities for political misuse” posed by the planning information systems Fehl and others were developing. Taking this accusation as a point of departure, this presentation follows the informational architectures behind spatial planning in the Federal Republic of Germany and asks how planning information systems were designed to operate under conditions of incomplete information.

From the 1960s onwards, competing planning information systems – computer-assisted systems for organising spatial information in support of planning decisions – emerged at different administrative scales. Spatial data management expanded from regional and state-level systems towards national and eventually international infrastructures. Perhaps the most ambitious, yet historically unexplored, project within this development was the Umwelt-Planungs-Informations-System (UMPLIS), commissioned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior amid growing concern over West Germany’s deficit in environmental information. It was conceived from 1971 by design theorist Horst Rittel, Werner Kunz, and the Heidelberg-based Studiengruppe für Systemforschung. More than a database, UMPLIS was imagined as a cybernetic planning system that would connect dispersed environmental knowledge and make it operational for planning.

By unpacking the archive of UMPLIS, I follow the “art of bureaucracy” that emerged around it, alongside rival designs and institutional resistance. Ultimately, the project encountered a problem described by Ashby’s law of requisite variety: the more kinds of environmental information and planning problems UMPLIS was expected to handle, the more distinctions and possible responses had to be built into the system. The attempt to manage complexity thus produced an increasingly complex administrative apparatus. At the same time, rival proposals and unrealised “counter-models” opened up alternative futures for planning information systems. UMPLIS shifted from fantasies of cybernetic environmental control towards more democratic, issue-based forms of decision support. Tracing the development of planning information systems from the 1960s onwards offers an alternative prehistory for current questions of digital twins and AI governance.

***

Winning Time:
Transnational Architecture and the Production of Speed in Reform-Era Shanghai, 1981-85

ZENGXIN WEN
Tongji University

Respondent: TBD

Shanghai, 1986: In this sprawling cityscape, the towering tinted glass of the Union Building dominated the emerging skyline. Against its scale, the historically prominent Customs House and domed former HSBC Building receded into the backdrop along the busy Huangpu River.
(Photography © Lu Jie / 陆杰)

Captured in Lu Jie’s photography as a glaring contrast to the neighboring masonry and densely packed alleyway houses, the Union Building disrupted three decades of architectural stasis on Shanghai’s historic Bund. Constructed in just 14 months, this tower epitomized the construction boom of China’s first post-reform decade, when high-rises were rapidly erected across cities like Guangzhou, Nanjing, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Shanghai to alleviate hotel and office shortages following the country’s opening up in 1978. These projects were further accelerated under Deng Xiaoping’s call to “learn from Shenzhen,” where the International Trade Center had set a record of “one floor in three days” in 1983. Based on one chapter of my dissertation, this talk centers on this record-breaking speed of construction, and asks: what techno-political and economic transitions made this speed possible, and how did it differ from the Mao-era pursuit of construction speed?

Drawing on extensive municipal, corporate, and media archives, I highlight the infrastructural role of socialist institutional actors in accelerating physical construction, navigating inter-city competition, and orchestrating transregional flows of financial capital, commercial ideologies, engineering technologies, and architectural expertise and labor. In the case of the Union Building, contractual negotiations between the local state-run investment company and the Hong Kong developer tied construction speed to future revenues and liquidated damages, while legitimizing strict domestic control over architectural work as a means to balance economic and political risks. To “compete with Shenzhen,” local technocratic institutions reorganized and synchronized design, engineering, and construction workflows, integrating Mao-era labor practices with imported building systems and management sciences. Extending this case to contemporaneous foreign-invested projects, I argue that such high-rises functioned not only as visual monuments to China’s global economic reintegration, but as critical contact zones that forged technocratic hierarchies and a new economic ethic—in the words of socialist state investors, “winning time” was no longer separable from “making wealth.”

23 March 2027
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

To Build a Hill: Residential Architecture and Terraforming in the Soviet Baltics

MEGIJA MILBERGA
NYU

Respondent: TBD

Lazdynai on the cover of Werner Rietdorf, Neue Wohngebiete sozialistischer Länder [New Residential Districts in Socialist Countries] (Berlin: VEB Verlag für Bauwesen, 1976). Image from Marija Drėmaitė and Vaidas Petrulis, “Modernism in Soviet Lithuania: The Rise and Fall of Utopia,” a lecture presented as part of Showcasing Modernisms: Between Nostalgia and Criticism, organized by Architektūros [leidinių] fondas, Vilnius, October 25, 2013

This paper examines the hitherto unexplored practice of terrain flattening in Soviet residential construction, reading it as a political and cultural operation through which architecture participated in the construction of local ecosocial imaginaries.

Soviet building practices routinely treated hills as obstacles, levelling relief to produce surfaces suited to the construction of rapid-assembly residential districts. In the summer of 1959, the pine-covered hills on the left bank of Riga disappeared beneath the construction of the capital’s first large-panel housing estate, Āgenskalna Priedes. This paper follows the thousands of cubic metres of earth displaced in their levelling, reading the eradication of the hill-body as both the production of a construction substrate and as a material imprint of Soviet coloniality.

Less than a decade later, the Lazdynai residential district in Vilnius offered a markedly different approach. Team of Lithuanian architects chose to protect the site's forested, hilly terrain from standard levelling, arranging housing blocks along the slopes, thus amplifying the landform and cultivating heightened awareness of the topography. Yet Lazdynai's significance lay not only in the decision to preserve terrain, but in the effort expended to promote it. Architects commissioned photographers to capture the "harmony between architecture and nature"; images disseminated through the international press repeatedly presented the district from a bird’s-eye view, rendering its topography visible and emulating the imagery of exemplary Nordic projects such as Tapiola in Finland. Moscow officials, who would later award the architects with the USSR’s highest acclaim, were likewise flown over the site by helicopter.

This paper argues that Lazdynai marked a turning point in the Soviet treatment of landscape, one that situated architectural experience within the lived particularity of the site, and interrupted the state's broader project of rendering territory interchangeable. This shift unearths terrain as an operative medium which renegotiated claims to land and identity.

***

Mikuni APT: Colonial Apartment and Primitive Accumulation

JANG HEE LEE
AA London

Respondent: TBD

East Facade of Naejadong Mikuni Apartment from Sajik-ro. Source: Joseon Newspaper, 1935.

This chapter reads the Naejadong Mikuni Apartment (1930–35) as the architectural condensation of Japan’s colonial economy in Korea. It argues that the apartment emerged through the historical process of primitive accumulation—the violent transformation of land, labour, and reproduction into the property relations of capital. Beginning from Manchuria’s coal frontier, where extraction and infrastructure produced the material and financial base of the empire, this chapter follows the circulation of this surplus through Mikuni Trading Company, which converted industrial profit into urban property in colonial Seoul. Through cadastral surveys and city planning, Korea was reorganised as a terrain of enclosure: irregular and customary tenures were redefined as measurable plots, and urban life was restructured by new regimes of ownership, circulation, and segregation. Within this reconstituted terrain, the Mikuni Apartment—designed by Kasai Shigeo and built by Shimizu-gumi—stood as both document and agent of a new construction industry, real estate market, and banking system that redefined architecture as an apparatus for organising reproduction under capital. Through its typological form—repetition, subdivision, and enclosure—the building translated the abstraction of economic relations into spatial order. The chapter thus reads the apartment type as a historical instrument through which colonial capitalism inscribed its political economy into the architecture itself.

6 April 2027
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Attuning to Plant Agency within Plasticulture Urbanism in Antalya

OZGE SUVARI
University of Westminster

Respondent: TBD

Plasti-culture landscapes of the Yesılkoy neighbourhood in Antalya, Kas, Taurus Mountains in the background, image: Ozge Suvari, taken during fieldwork, April 2025.

Plasticulture, the use of plastic-covered systems such as greenhouses, polytunnels, and mulches, has rapidly expanded worldwide and created agro-industrial landscapes that extend cultivation beyond seasonal limits. While these landscapes help meet rising food demands, they also intensify environmental problems through soil and water contamination, the accumulation of agricultural waste, and pressure on groundwater. To understand these complex dynamics, I approach plasticulture as a form of agrarian urbanism, an assemblage shaped simultaneously by local climate, soil, and topography and by planetary networks of transport, agrochemicals, and labour.

Drawing on multi-sited and multispecies ethnography, I focus on Antalya, Turkey, where plasti-culture landscapes are densely concentrated, and trace plants from the greenhouses where they are cultivated to the wholesale markets where they are sold. Through fieldwork and semi-structured interviews with farmers, agricultural scientists, wholesale market professionals, architects, and urbanists, I examine plant agency as a key component of the plasticulture assemblage, rather than adopting dominant approaches that quantify and map plasticulture landscapes and emphasise their visual impact.

The research on vegetal geographies shows that plants are not passive beings acted upon by people, technologies and places. Instead, they have an active agency as living beings; they shape labour routines, harvesting schedules, markets and the temporalities of farming. In Antalya, the expansion of plasti-culture landscapes is closely linked to microclimatic differences, the absence of peri-urban agricultural planning, and market pressures that encourage accelerated, standardised production. These relations reveal plasticulture as a living assemblage in which plastics, plants, pollinators, labour, soil, and transport infrastructures co-produce the landscape. Through a grounded, field-based analysis of plasti-culture landscapes, the research offers a more relational account of plasticulture, emphasising its temporal, seasonal, and more-than-human dimensions. In doing so, it brings research on greenhouse farming into conversation with urban studies and environmental humanities.

***

From a Technoscientific Landscape of Atomic Optimism to Infrastructural Zombie: Wylfa Nuclear Power Station and the Third Nuclear Renaissance

PETER WILLIAMS
University of Liverpool

Respondent: TBD

'Three Landscapes of Infrastructure’. Shown right to left: Wylfa Head, the location of WWII radar installations. In the centre, Wylfa A Nuclear Power Station, and on the left, the site of the proposed Small Modular Reactors. A ’Technical Landscape’ in the form of the rural picturesque. Threading through this are the 400 kV Supergrid connections, which at one time took power out from the nuclear site but today facilitate the connection of contested renewable energy on Ynys Môn. Image: Peter Jake Williams.

Wylfa is at a crossroads: a celebrated nuclear future of new Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) or a derided future of renewables—wind and solar farms covering large areas of what was once picturesque farmland.

In a rapidly changing energy future, what role does the Technoscientific-Landscape play in engaging local people? As part of DocTalks, I propose to discuss this evolving thinking, which will form part of the concluding chapter of my thesis, bringing together the landscape biography of the past, present, and future.

The Magnox reactors at Wylfa Power Station were the most advanced first-generation UK civil nuclear reactors. The site was among Dame Sylvia Crowe’s most accomplished landscapes. This was a public landscape that seemed to extend to the very edge of the reactors, a feat made possible by technical innovation. Crowe, a landscape architect of international standing, had given form and legitimacy to these new cathedrals of power within rural landscapes in the 1960s.

The landscape design success at Wylfa has subtly shaped local understanding of nuclear technology; however, the site has become an infrastructural zombie. The failure to build the second-generation reactor at the site in 1990 and again in 2021 has led to a persistent ‘future-in-the-making’ that never materialises, leaving the local population in limbo while ‘besieged’ by solar and wind farms that offer no tangible local benefits, such as employment or access.

In April 2026, Rolls-Royce confirmed its intention to build SMRs at Wylfa; however, the Magnox reactors were not designed for decommissioning and will remain on site long after the yet-to-be-built SMRs are demolished. I aim to discuss reflections on the landscape’s impact on visual culture during this divisive energy transition, and what it means for both the future of decommissioning and the third ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ at Wylfa and beyond.

18 May 2027
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Seeing Labour, Constructing Territory in the Maasai savannas in Kenya

RAQUEL JEROBON
ETH Zürich

Respondent: TBD

Be very still. Be quiet, don’t make any sudden/loud movements.

Encountering a herd of elephants with its baby calf at the Maasai Mara National Reserve. Source: Author, Fieldwork August 2025.

In the savannas of the Maasai Mara, the labour that animates this landscape and sustains its image as a global ‘wilderness’ often goes unnoticed. I argue that tour-guiding is a critical form of work that actively produces this space as a site of experience. Beginning with the safari, I focus on the image of the Land Cruiser as it cuts across the landscape and on the driver-guide as a central object of inquiry. Starting here allows me to examine the marginalisation and exploitation of tour guiding within the safari tourism economy. As conservation-based tourism gains prominence in the economic strategies of states like Kenya, new frontiers of nature emerge, even as sites of capital accumulation and profit extraction appear in geographies and landscapes often considered peripheral.

Yet, the forms of labour that make these experiences possible remain unconsidered.‘Wilderness’ conceptualisation packages territories as consumable landscapes of experience that attract investments driven by economic interests, international networks, and moral claims of nature conservation. These dynamics shape how tour-guiding labour is contested, negotiated, unpredictable and rendered precarious even as investments in conservation-based tourism grow. I approach these frictions anddiscontinuities to explore the complex entanglements involved in producing the experience of the wild. I ultimately argue that conservation needs to come to terms with the forms of labour it continuously reproduces, renders precarious and ultimately requalifies as its accumulation of capital and territory continues to unfold in southern contexts.

***

Castelion

Dr. Taylor Miller
Writer and Research based between the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Desert

Respondent: TBD

A drive through the Chihuahuan Desert; the logics of terra nullius and the ongoing ruination by hypersonic missile manufacture.

I propose we take a step back when considering the scale and speed of compounding -cide by every name, across Gaza and greater Palestine, for more than seven decades. While much theorization centers on the act of and encounter with destruction – heaved earth and craters from MK-84 2,000-pound bombs… homes, hospitals and schools razed by D9 bulldozers – do we adequately account for the destruction (demolition) required to manufacture these munitions and correlated surveillance technologies? In particular, I want to focus on the constellation of defense contracting, land leases, and – far more ephemerally if not most oft overlooked – the fragile ecologies decimated to make way for the next test site, next missile plant.

The Sonoran Desert is my longtime home, where empire’s Research & Development and logistics reproduce an ongoing Manifest Destiny – treating the land and its human and more-than-human inhabitants as terra nullius; the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and their waterways in tandem with the unwieldy theft of massive tracts of land, of life. While I’ve written much on Raytheon Missiles and Defense – with a headquarters in Tucson, Arizona – I seek to shift my attention to Castelion. This company, based in Torrance, California,“designs, tests, and manufactures next-generation military systems rapidly and at massive scale to deter future wars.”

While the company’s background is integral to understanding this bigger picture, what’s in its crosshairs is of most interest: November 2025, Castelion announced “Project Ranger,” New Mexico’s Newest Hypersonic Manufacturing Campus.” This Sandoval County site, more than 1,000 acres (and counting) of Pueblo and Diné Bikéyah land, will “produce solid rocket motors, conduct static tests, and assemble components to produce finished rounds.” Castelion is also in-progress acquiring (stealing) over 1,000 acres in Pinal County, Arizona (Akimel O’odham and O’odham Jeweḍ land) vis a vis deceptive rezoning plans and agreements with Resolution Copper Filter Plant.

This is to say, the not-so-distant future weapons that will continue annihilating Palestine (and Lebanon, Yemen, and…and…) in the interest of unfettered flows of capital are / will be built on sacred territories that have been historically occupied, poisoned and and wrung-dry. And at this moment, I feel urgency to spotlight their in-progress and forthcoming ruination of these sites to draw additional attention to these cogs in the gears of forever warfare.

Manazir x DocTalks

1 June 2027
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Dismembering the Unruly: Inscription, Earthquake, and the Domestication of Amazigh Heritage in Morocco

REDA BERRADA
École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

YASSINE RACHIDI
University of Basel

Respondent: TBA

House in the Haouz facing the national road, exterior view.
Photograph: Yassine Rachidi, June 2026.

This paper reads the stripping of specificity from Amazigh rural heritage as an architectural echo of what Itohan Osayimwese calls “dismemberment”: the colonial-era practice of severing African buildings into fragments and dispersing them into museum collections, where they were reclassified as ornamental objects once stripped of architectural and functional context (Osayimwese, 2025). Throughout the twentieth century, Amazigh vernacular architecture in Morocco was subjected to an analogous, if less literal, dismemberment: ethnographic surveys, state reports, and indigenous art catalogues rendered it into inscriptions — Latour’s term for the flat, combinable traces through which a distant administration comes to know and act upon a territory (Latour, 1987) — circulating through regimes of classification detached from the communities that produced them. The Centre d’Expérimentation, de Recherche et de Formation’s 1970 national survey of rural habitat exemplifies this apparatus, translating Amazigh dwellings into cost tables, material inventories, anda “prospective model” for renovation (Hensens, 1970). This paper argues that the September 2023 Al Haouz earthquake did not interrupt this history but extended it, offering the Moroccan state a new occasion to render legible what earlier administrations had designated bled es-siba, the land of dissidence (Montagne, 1930).

Reconstruction is examined through a specific mechanism: state aid disbursement is conditioned on facade completion rather than interior habitability. This produces a facade that signals completion while concealing unfinished and often uninhabitable interiors. The brown-earth coating does not preserve Haouz vernacular forms; it performs them, substituting a legible image of rehousing for the material and social continuity heritage was meant to sustain. The facade thus inverts Osayimwese’s dismemberment: rather than extracting a fragment for external display, the state manufactures one — a single elevation — and inscribes it as the whole.

Archival silences surrounding these communities are treated throughout not as incidental gaps but as the deliberate residue of a century-long effort at containment. The paper closes by arguing for modes of architectural research attentive to indigenous practices of inscribing and transmitting knowledge, as a counterpoint to the state’sown.

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Artisanal Frictions: Tilework at the Yıldız Factory in the Late Ottoman Empire (1908-1920)

BERİL SARISAKAL ERKENT
Columbia University

Respondent: TBA

Artists and artisans at work painting tiles at Topkapı Palace, including master carpenter Andon and Yıldız Factory painter Halid Naci, undated. Turkish Historical Society Archives, Halil Ethem Eldem Collection (HEE), 168/1/7.

In 1912, the new administrators of the Yıldız Porcelain and Tile Factory in Istanbul invited two artisans from Kütahya to oversee production and train new apprentices in tile-making. The call sought to harness the artisanal know-how of these renowned makers into an imperial factory originally established for Sèvres-style porcelain manufacturing. Yet Kütahya artisans refused employment, fearing that the state-led systematization of tile-making through mechanized kiln technologies and regimented design processes would displace their specialized skill and labor. This chapter examines the ostensibly competing positions of state-sponsored factory production and small-scale craft enterprises in the late Ottoman Empire. Focusing on the Yıldız Factory in the post-constitution era, it investigates the relationship between artisanal knowledge, industrialization, and the institutional regulation of craft against a backdrop of shifting political-economic agendas.

Scholarship on late Ottoman wall tiles has focused on their culturo-aesthetic significance, interpreting their twentieth-century proliferation as a hallmark of national architecture, dubbing it the “First National Style.” Rather than treating the resurgence of tile architecture as a mere ideological phenomenon, this paper approaches tile making as a set of material and epistemic practices entangled within emerging professional organizations and the late Ottoman liberal political economy. While Yıldız was being idealized as a state apparatus to modernize traditional crafts and integrate them into global markets, the attempts to institutionalize production and apprenticeship did not necessarily align with the professional and economic agendas of small-scale manufacturers. This chapter investigates techniques, instruments, and practices between workshop-based enterprises and factory manufacturing against the setting of stateinitiatives promoting incorporation and competition to argue that the burgeoning integration of crafts into architecture was motivated less by a nationalist codification of aesthetics than by sectoral protectionism of artisans. Amid these competing regimes of making, even as architecture became more tile-based, Yıldız remained an incomplete project.