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
︎
Regular Talks
︎︎︎Online Sessions Link︎︎︎
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︎︎︎Online Sessions Link︎︎︎
16 December 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Much Older Than Any Academy:The Anthropological Turn of the Avant-Garde in the 1930s
JOLANDA DEVALLE
EPFL
Respondent: TBA
Raoul Hausmann, Casa Cerca de Cala Llonga Santa Eulalia del Rio, Ibiza (1935). ©MDAC Rochechouart
In the early 1930s, a constellation of exiled intellectuals fleeing Fascism found refuge in the island of Ibiza and encountered the finca, the island’s rural farmhouse—that struck the deepest chord. Among them were three figures whose paths briefly converged on the island: Walter Benjamin, Raoul Hausmann and Walter Segal. Each, in very different ways, observed the finca through writings, drawings or photography, turning the island’s rural architecture into a lens through which to question the relationship between form and life and to probe the stakes of modernity in crisis. Benjamin who spent nine months on the island in 1932–1933, observed Ibizan oral traditions, landscape, and dwellings in his Suite D’Ibiza, while reflection on the erosions of forms such as narrative and craft. Hausmann, the former Berlin Dadaist, stayed from 1933 to 1936, and in a dramatic reversal of his earlier provocations, he turned to an anthropological study, producing hundreds of photographs, surveys and essays on the finca, some published in journals including Oeuvres, (1934) L’Architecture D’Aujourd’hui (1935) and AC (1936). Meanwhile, the young Berlin-trained architect Walter Segal, working on a commission in the Balearics, undertook his own surveys and the wrote the unpublished The Domestic Architecture of Ibiza (1934), reading the finca typologically as a diagram of family structure, labor, and economy. This presentation offers a critical reappraisal of their writings, surveys, photography on the Ibizan dwellings to discuss how and why the historical crisis of the avant-garde in the 1930s coincided with a “turn” towards the anthropological and a longing for forms that appeared and archaic, impersonal, and timeless.
***The Architecture of the Making of the Author
SEVGİ TÜRKKAN
Istanbul Technical University
Respondent: TBA
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.
13 January 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Red Clocks and the Modern Metropolis: the Politics of Time in Red Vienna’s Municipal Housing Programme
JEROME BECKER
KU Leuven
Respondent: TBA
Bildertafel des Gesellschafts- und Wirtschaftsmuseums für die Ausstellung "Wien und die Wiener" 1927, (Wienbibliothek im Rathaus, B-72974, https://resolver.obvsg.at/urn:nbn:at:AT-WBR-132804 / Public Domain Mark 1.0).
Since the onset of modern urbanisation, significant shifts in the synchronisation of living and working have challenged daily rhythms and temporal patterns of inhabiting cities. These temporal shifts, however, have not evolved without conflict. Until today, time is perceived as a contested resource—whether in struggles against exploitative working hours, in demands for more free time, or in resistance to the gendered and racial division of labour. It strangely belongs to us, yet we have to give it away and trade it, by spending it on others or selling it as working hours. How we use and experience time is not simply a matter of individual choice but a question of social justice. It is always conditioned by how everyday life is organised—politically, economically, and spatially.
This paper examines the reciprocal relationship between the socio-political coordination of urban life and the spatial conditions in which multiple temporalities unfold, focusing on the politics of time within Red Vienna’s municipal housing programme (1919–1934). This historical case stands out as a rare instance in which time was explicitly understood as a matter of political negotiation. Drawing on archival research, policy documents, and discourse ana- lysis, I trace how the Austromarxist movement’s diverse conceptions of time—abstract, projective, and relational— shaped the spatial parameters of the housing programme.
By re-examining this well-studied case through a chro- nopolitical lens, the paper highlights an underexplored dimension of urban politics in Red Vienna and, more broadly, seeks to enrich architectural history and theory by foregrounding the temporal politics of public housing.
This paper examines the reciprocal relationship between the socio-political coordination of urban life and the spatial conditions in which multiple temporalities unfold, focusing on the politics of time within Red Vienna’s municipal housing programme (1919–1934). This historical case stands out as a rare instance in which time was explicitly understood as a matter of political negotiation. Drawing on archival research, policy documents, and discourse ana- lysis, I trace how the Austromarxist movement’s diverse conceptions of time—abstract, projective, and relational— shaped the spatial parameters of the housing programme.
By re-examining this well-studied case through a chro- nopolitical lens, the paper highlights an underexplored dimension of urban politics in Red Vienna and, more broadly, seeks to enrich architectural history and theory by foregrounding the temporal politics of public housing.
***
Claims from the Margins: Group Activism in Vienna’s Built Environment, 1870–1942
ULLI UNTERWEGER
University of Texas at Austin
Respondent: TBA
Postcard of the Czech School Association Komenský, Featuring the Community’s First School Building. A. Werner, Around 1900 (Author’s Research Collection)
My dissertation examines how Vienna’s three largest marginalized groups—Jews, Czechs, and womenacross class lines—created spaces for themselves in the shifting socio-political landscape of the late Habsburg Empire through the Interwar Period.
Vienna has long held a central place in the canon of Western architectural and cultural history, often framed through top-down initiatives such as the Ringstraße or Red Vienna and the work of individual architects and theorists. Recent scholarship has broadened this picture by highlighting the contributions of women and Jews. Still, these accounts usually focus on professional designers or affluent clients,whereas the experiences of other marginalized groups remain largely absent. My dissertation explores these lesser-known histories by considering the activities of associations (Vereine)—democratically structured organizations that legally belonged to the private sphere but often fulfilled socio-political functions associated with the public realm.
Through five case studies—synagogue associations, a Czech school association, bourgeois women’s clubs, sports clubs, and associations of working-class women—I examine a spectrum of engagements with the built environment, from informal spatial practices to design projects by renowned architects. Three guiding questions shape my research: What strategies did these groups use to establish and maintain spaces for themselves? What role did architecture and design play in their endeavors? And how did architectural professionals—architects, designers, builders—participate in these efforts? My analysis draws on a wide range of sources, including surviving buildings, architectural plans and drawings, historical photographs and postcards, contemporary publications, and materials from private archives.
This paper discusses the methodological challenges and preliminary findings of this approach. By concentrating on associations—entities with stable legal frameworks yet shifting memberships acrossseven decades—it reflects on the possibilities and limitations of writing architectural history from acollective perspective rather than focusing on individuals.
Vienna has long held a central place in the canon of Western architectural and cultural history, often framed through top-down initiatives such as the Ringstraße or Red Vienna and the work of individual architects and theorists. Recent scholarship has broadened this picture by highlighting the contributions of women and Jews. Still, these accounts usually focus on professional designers or affluent clients,whereas the experiences of other marginalized groups remain largely absent. My dissertation explores these lesser-known histories by considering the activities of associations (Vereine)—democratically structured organizations that legally belonged to the private sphere but often fulfilled socio-political functions associated with the public realm.
Through five case studies—synagogue associations, a Czech school association, bourgeois women’s clubs, sports clubs, and associations of working-class women—I examine a spectrum of engagements with the built environment, from informal spatial practices to design projects by renowned architects. Three guiding questions shape my research: What strategies did these groups use to establish and maintain spaces for themselves? What role did architecture and design play in their endeavors? And how did architectural professionals—architects, designers, builders—participate in these efforts? My analysis draws on a wide range of sources, including surviving buildings, architectural plans and drawings, historical photographs and postcards, contemporary publications, and materials from private archives.
This paper discusses the methodological challenges and preliminary findings of this approach. By concentrating on associations—entities with stable legal frameworks yet shifting memberships acrossseven decades—it reflects on the possibilities and limitations of writing architectural history from acollective perspective rather than focusing on individuals.
27 January 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Constructing Freedom: Slavery, Religion, and Abolitionist Architecture in the Nineteenth-Century South
HAMPTON SMITH
MIT
Respondent: Sonali Dhanpal, Columbia University
The First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Georgia, Front View, from Franklin Square. Rev. E. K. Love, D. D. History of the First African Baptist Church, Savannah, Ga. The Morning News Print. 1888.
In 1793, congregants of the First African Baptist Church in Savannah, Georgia purchased land and began constructing a sanctuary with bricks fired on nearby plantations. The sixty-six years it took to complete the building marked the difficulty of sustaining a “for-us, by-us” institution under slavery, where Black worship was legally supervised and often violently disrupted. Securing a site, materials, and labor outside enslavers’ channels posed further barriers. Under these constraints, the church’s 1859 brick exterior adopted Euro-American proportions legible to officials—a tactical sign of civic legitimacy. Yet behind this façade, the story of its construction reveals underground practices of fundraising, exchange, and labor that contested planter control and cultivated Black autonomy.
First, fundraising drew on the wages of hired-out artisans, surpluses from subsistence gardening,and mutual aid networks. Second, sourcing materials avoided dependence on planter wealth and supply chains. Congregants turned instead to Savannah’s internal market, where enslaved laborers sold goods, sometimes stolen from plantations. Court records from the 1820s allege that members of the First African Baptist Church purchased bricks from enslaved brickmakers at the Hermitage, Savannah’s largest brickmaking plantation, who had taken them “without ticket with permission to trade.” These exchanges implicated the congregation directly in an underground economy that defied planter control and sustained Black community building. Third, the collaborative building process—men and women hewing timber, laying brick, and raising the sanctuary—forged reciprocal social and ecological relationships.
The sanctuary’s later role on the Underground Railroad makes clear that abolition was not only imagined but enacted in the making of the church itself. What authorities read as a brick façade of civic conformity was in fact the material record of an abolitionist practice, carried out in the very process of construction.
First, fundraising drew on the wages of hired-out artisans, surpluses from subsistence gardening,and mutual aid networks. Second, sourcing materials avoided dependence on planter wealth and supply chains. Congregants turned instead to Savannah’s internal market, where enslaved laborers sold goods, sometimes stolen from plantations. Court records from the 1820s allege that members of the First African Baptist Church purchased bricks from enslaved brickmakers at the Hermitage, Savannah’s largest brickmaking plantation, who had taken them “without ticket with permission to trade.” These exchanges implicated the congregation directly in an underground economy that defied planter control and sustained Black community building. Third, the collaborative building process—men and women hewing timber, laying brick, and raising the sanctuary—forged reciprocal social and ecological relationships.
The sanctuary’s later role on the Underground Railroad makes clear that abolition was not only imagined but enacted in the making of the church itself. What authorities read as a brick façade of civic conformity was in fact the material record of an abolitionist practice, carried out in the very process of construction.
***
Prince Hall Freemasonry and the Spatial Production of Black Identity
TRISTAN WHALEN
Brown University
Respondent: Sonali Dhanpal, Columbia University
This paper argues that Prince Hall Freemasonry—the Black Masonic tradition established in late 18th-century Boston—provides a critical lens for examining how architecture has mediated race and human difference in American civic history. I pursue two strands of investigation: first, the sociohistorical origins of Prince Hall Freemasonry and the formation of the first “African Lodge”; second, an analysis of a Prince Hall Temple built in 1920’s Birmingham, designed by Robert Taylor.
Prince Hall (1735–1807), a free Black man living in Boston, was denied entry to St. John’s Lodge—Boston’s oldest and most prominent masonic body—in 1774. In 1775, Hall and 15 other free Black men were initiated into Freemasonry by members of an Irish military lodge forming African Lodge No. 1. The Lodge’s layered functions—combining political activism, anti-racist advocacy, and fraternal organization—were later architecturally reinscribed in Alabama’s Prince Hall Grand Lodge, a seven-story Renaissance Revival monolith in Birmingham’s historic 4th Avenue District, built in 1924. In the 1950s, the temple became an essential instrument of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a staging ground for organizing protests and sit-ins, home to The Booker T. Washington Library (the first public lending library open to Black citizens in Birmingham), and later, home to the offices of Alabama’s NAACP chapter.
Analyzing these two nodes—Boston’s African Lodge and Birmingham’s Grand Lodge—reveals how Prince Hall Freemasonry negotiated visibility and invisibility, creating spatial strategies that resisted hegemonic racial hierarchies. Together, these cases demonstrate how the fraternity structured Black identity through dialectical tensions: public Blackness versus secret brotherhood, race as a social signifier versus private experience, and traditional Masonic history versus a distinct Black Masonic genealogy. Situating Prince Hall architecture within recent scholarship on race and the built environment underscores how Freemasonry produced and contested racial difference, while illustrating how Black Americans in the 1920s appropriated architectural forms of power and ritual to contest their exclusion from civic space.
Prince Hall (1735–1807), a free Black man living in Boston, was denied entry to St. John’s Lodge—Boston’s oldest and most prominent masonic body—in 1774. In 1775, Hall and 15 other free Black men were initiated into Freemasonry by members of an Irish military lodge forming African Lodge No. 1. The Lodge’s layered functions—combining political activism, anti-racist advocacy, and fraternal organization—were later architecturally reinscribed in Alabama’s Prince Hall Grand Lodge, a seven-story Renaissance Revival monolith in Birmingham’s historic 4th Avenue District, built in 1924. In the 1950s, the temple became an essential instrument of the Civil Rights Movement. It was a staging ground for organizing protests and sit-ins, home to The Booker T. Washington Library (the first public lending library open to Black citizens in Birmingham), and later, home to the offices of Alabama’s NAACP chapter.
Analyzing these two nodes—Boston’s African Lodge and Birmingham’s Grand Lodge—reveals how Prince Hall Freemasonry negotiated visibility and invisibility, creating spatial strategies that resisted hegemonic racial hierarchies. Together, these cases demonstrate how the fraternity structured Black identity through dialectical tensions: public Blackness versus secret brotherhood, race as a social signifier versus private experience, and traditional Masonic history versus a distinct Black Masonic genealogy. Situating Prince Hall architecture within recent scholarship on race and the built environment underscores how Freemasonry produced and contested racial difference, while illustrating how Black Americans in the 1920s appropriated architectural forms of power and ritual to contest their exclusion from civic space.
10 February 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
“If One Knew Where to Look:” Encoding Plants into Data at the American Horticultural Society’s Plant Records Center
SONIA SOBRINO RALSTON
Harvard University
Respondent: Camila Medina Novoa, ETHZ
The Plant Data Sciences Center's (formerly Plant Records Center) master inventory of plants in participating collections as microfiche, 1979. Arnold Arboretum Archives, photo by Sonia Sobrino Ralston.
In the late 1960s, botanical gardens and arboreta transformed from living collections to computerized databases. Influenced by the introduction of mainframe computers to research institutions and universities, the American Horticultural Society’s Plant Records Center attempted to centralize botanical accession records in collectionss nation-wide database to facilitate locating and comparing records. As AHS director Robert MacDonald wrote advocating for its development in 1973: “...a specimen of almost any cultivated plant might be found in one or more of these collections, if one knew where to look.”1Since the inception of living collections, cataloging has been a longstanding conundrum: plants defy control. As living, sessile organisms, plants’ growth and death is unfixed and monitoring requires the intense, scrutinous labor of ground truthing. From ledger to punch card, the work of horticulturalists and landscape architects to shape and maintain spaces of botanical information was complemented by a new landscape worker in the 1960s: the computer operator.
This paper explores how the mission to centralize living plant records into standardized bioinformatic system was shaped in equal measure by the limitations of early computers and the local, situated knowledge of landscape workers. Not only were plant records maintained by gardeners, laid out by landscape architects, and managed by botanical scientists, but they were also translated into accession punch cards by that were subject to the local and personal idiosyncrasies of landscape data managers. Taking a microfiche from 1979 documenting the entirety of the plant holdings of the Plant Records Center’s participating network of living collections as the starting point, this paper aims to discuss the format of the plant accession record and its translation from analog to digital format in a moment of rapid technological change. Focusing on the archival collections of the Arnold Arboretum, a main participant in the early pilot projects of the Plant Record Center, I aim to unravel the tensions between the media of encoding, the unruly plant subject, and the labor of centralization that ultimately led to the failure of a centralized national system by 1985. The paper argues that the translation to digital formats, or the microfiche, resulted in new forms of landscape labor and knowledge production, but also flattening and omissions resulting from fit fixed-length fields on punch cards. This moment of digitizing living collections thus reveals how translations from local to centralized, physical to digital, and plant to data, was not just a question of media, but one that had enduring effects on the way landscapes are known, designed, and produced.
This paper explores how the mission to centralize living plant records into standardized bioinformatic system was shaped in equal measure by the limitations of early computers and the local, situated knowledge of landscape workers. Not only were plant records maintained by gardeners, laid out by landscape architects, and managed by botanical scientists, but they were also translated into accession punch cards by that were subject to the local and personal idiosyncrasies of landscape data managers. Taking a microfiche from 1979 documenting the entirety of the plant holdings of the Plant Records Center’s participating network of living collections as the starting point, this paper aims to discuss the format of the plant accession record and its translation from analog to digital format in a moment of rapid technological change. Focusing on the archival collections of the Arnold Arboretum, a main participant in the early pilot projects of the Plant Record Center, I aim to unravel the tensions between the media of encoding, the unruly plant subject, and the labor of centralization that ultimately led to the failure of a centralized national system by 1985. The paper argues that the translation to digital formats, or the microfiche, resulted in new forms of landscape labor and knowledge production, but also flattening and omissions resulting from fit fixed-length fields on punch cards. This moment of digitizing living collections thus reveals how translations from local to centralized, physical to digital, and plant to data, was not just a question of media, but one that had enduring effects on the way landscapes are known, designed, and produced.
***
THE CEMETERY AND THE
DIGITALISATION OF MEMORY: Death, collective memory and virtual space
in the contemporary city
STEFANIA RASILE
ETH Zürich
Respondent: Gruia Badescu, University of Konstanz
Frame from Ingmar Bergman’s film The Seventh Seal (1957).
The advancement of information technologies, the transition from the mechanical-analogue era to the digital age, has transformed the way we communicate and store the memory of the deceased. Carved stone, photography, hard drive, cloud storage: this sequence manifests the physical contraction of the memory container while increasing the amount of information, which apparently sheds its physical presence. Today, the production, accumulation, and daily reproduction of personal digital data impact the post-mortem dimension of individuals. The use of digital technology is conditioning the approach to memory not only from a cultural perspective but also from an architectural and urban viewpoint. The architecture of death relates to the invisible and symbolically represents the deceased through material means, aiming to endure over time and perpetuate their memory within the community despite their absence. In an era where commemorative practices are increasingly virtualized, this research explores how the digitization of memory conditions the architecture of remembrance. As its methodology, the research takes on a combination of historical analysis and digital experimentation. The convergence of these phases and approaches seeks to deepen the understanding of the monumental condition in contemporary society, viewed through the lenses of architectural history and technological development. The utilization of artificial intelligence and extended reality advances research by enabling interactive engagement, thereby bridging the physical and virtual worlds. This research tackles the architectural dimension of current sociological studies on Digital Death, exploring the intersections of collective memory, architecture, and virtual space.
24 February 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Cultural imaginaries of allergy and the home in the mid 20th century United States
ERICA VINSON
McGill School of Architecture
Respondent: TBA
Brochure from the Sinclair Hotel, located in Bethlehem, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains. There's A summer of fun ahead at The Sinclair, Bethlehem, New Hampshire, 194-, NC 917.422 S6161br, New Hampshire State Library.
I am interested in the enclaves and resort towns that grew around ragweed retreats. Bethlehem, New Hampshire, nestled in the White Mountains, exists between the constructed comfort and familiarity of hotels and the awe-inspiring, alien landscapes of the mountains. How did ideas of hospitality and habitability square with the need for barren landscapes? How did the constructed familiarity of the hotels affect how visiting allergenics imagined the mountains? By analyzing the promotional material produced by prominent Bethlehem hotels, I explore how promises of comfort and relief worked to domesticate the White Mountains and reframe longstanding notions of the mountains’ mythical status to fit more neatly into 20th-century ideas of treatment and consumerism.
***
Could Feminism Reside Here? Revisiting Domestic Space in Athens’ Polykatoikia
GEORGINA PANTAZOPOULOU
University of Antwerp
Respondent: TBA
From Inside to Outside, and Back Again: A Polykatoikia Interior, Illustration, Georgina Pantazopoulou, 2025.
Could the rigid lines of modernist architecture become porous through touch, memory, and everyday improvisation? This project asks whether Athens’ polykatoikia—a post-war housing typology built on repetition and standardization—can be re-read through the bodily and sensorial practices of its inhabitants. Rooted in feminist and intersectional theory, the research explores how people dwell, adapt, and inhabit these spaces in ways that unsettle their original, masculinist design logic.
Using post-war Athens’ polykatoikia as its lens, the research mobilizes intersectional feminist theory to interrogate how interiors mediate culture, behavior, and equity. Through desk research and preliminary field observations in two polykatoikia subtypes—social-housing and antiparochi—the study reframes the home as a site of situated knowledge and collective creativity. Women extending kitchens onto balconies, children claiming stairwells as playrooms, families transforming thresholds into shared zones of encounter—these unmapped gestures are understood not merely as utilitarian responses, but as embodied acts of negotiation, resistance, and care. The project asks: can these lived interventions—intimate, improvised, and often invisible—be understood as feminist spatial practices, even when they are not named as such?
Modernism’s rationalist ethos, with its emphasis on modularity, universality, and functionality, left little room for difference, softness, or emotion. Yet within the repetitive structures of the polykatoikia, bodies leak through the blueprint—they reconfigure space not through demolition, but through accumulation, routine, and tactile memory. The home becomes a site of friction between architecture’s intention and life’s insistence: a space shaped as much by cultural norms and social constraints as by personal gestures and collective memory.
The research aims to move through its spaces with curiosity and attention. It listens for the feminist potential in daily acts: in the way rooms are rearranged to care, to cope, to claim autonomy. It invites us to consider architecture not only as structure, but as a living archive of bodies in relation, and to ask: what happens when home is not designed for us, but we inhabit it anyway—differently, tenderly, insistently?
Using post-war Athens’ polykatoikia as its lens, the research mobilizes intersectional feminist theory to interrogate how interiors mediate culture, behavior, and equity. Through desk research and preliminary field observations in two polykatoikia subtypes—social-housing and antiparochi—the study reframes the home as a site of situated knowledge and collective creativity. Women extending kitchens onto balconies, children claiming stairwells as playrooms, families transforming thresholds into shared zones of encounter—these unmapped gestures are understood not merely as utilitarian responses, but as embodied acts of negotiation, resistance, and care. The project asks: can these lived interventions—intimate, improvised, and often invisible—be understood as feminist spatial practices, even when they are not named as such?
Modernism’s rationalist ethos, with its emphasis on modularity, universality, and functionality, left little room for difference, softness, or emotion. Yet within the repetitive structures of the polykatoikia, bodies leak through the blueprint—they reconfigure space not through demolition, but through accumulation, routine, and tactile memory. The home becomes a site of friction between architecture’s intention and life’s insistence: a space shaped as much by cultural norms and social constraints as by personal gestures and collective memory.
The research aims to move through its spaces with curiosity and attention. It listens for the feminist potential in daily acts: in the way rooms are rearranged to care, to cope, to claim autonomy. It invites us to consider architecture not only as structure, but as a living archive of bodies in relation, and to ask: what happens when home is not designed for us, but we inhabit it anyway—differently, tenderly, insistently?
10 March 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Ashes to Ashes: Reading the Ruins of the Dutch Colonial Sugar Industry in Postcolonial Java
SANDRO ARMANDA
KU Leuven
Respondent: TBA
KU Leuven
Respondent: TBA
The
Wringin Anom Sugar Factory hidden behind the dense sugarcane field. Photo by
Sandro Armanda, 2025.
The Wringin Anom Sugar Factory is one of the few remaining nineteenth-century sugar factories still operating in Java today. Originally built by a British sugar manufacturer in 1845, the factory compound once functioned not only as a centre of sugar production but also as a tool of colonial control over the surrounding population and plantation landscape. Today, the site is on the verge of ruin.
Java’s colonial sugar industry began to collapse in the 1930s and was nationalised by the Indonesian state in 1958. Once a leading global exporter of sugar, Java now imports sugar on a massive scale, with Indonesia ranking among the world’s largest importers. The physical infrastructure left behind by thecolonial sugar industry – comprising roads, housing, and plantations – has largely deteriorated, yet it continues to influence rural life and labour today. For instance, the socioeconomic systems and shifts in land ownership that were established during the colonial-industrial era of the nineteenth century continue to exist. Additionally, housing facilities for sugar factory workers, built by sugar manufacturers that introduced modern construction methods, materials, and hygiene standards to the countryside, continue to influence domestic architecture in broader Javanese rural communities today.
In this presentation, I will showcase a work-in-progress paper examining the spatial, architectural, and social legacy of the Dutch colonial sugar industry in postcolonial Java through a case study of the Wringin Anom factory compound – a workers’ village designed around notions of hierarchy, efficiency, and control, which remains inhabited today. Drawing on extensive fieldwork and a lengthy research stay in the factory’s workers’ housing facilities, the paper aims to present the spatial conditions of colonial-era housing in the postcolony. It brings to light how these environments reflect and reinforce labour hierarchies, shaping the lives and livelihoods of contemporary sugar workers in Java’s rural
landscape.
***
Global Ambitions, Planetary Forces: Drainage, Urban Planning, and the Making of Iskenderun, 1851
FEYZA DALOGLU
METU, Middle East Technical University
Respondent: TBA
METU, Middle East Technical University
Respondent: TBA
Plan of the Executed Canal Project of 1851 and the Proposed
Expansion Plan for İskenderun. The National Archives (TNA), FO 195/302, no. 6.
In 1851, the third failed canal project of Iskenderun, designed to drain its centuries-old marshes, was laid out and executed by the Hungarian engineer General Maximilian Stein, who served in the Ottoman army as Ferhat Pasha after fleeing the Habsburg Empire. A former Minister of War and Governor of Transylvania, Ferhat Pasha, also prepared Iskenderun’s first urban plan. Though the canal later overflooded and the urban plan was never implemented, both projects reveal the tension between planetary processes and global pressures which would define the making of mid-19th century Iskenderun.
Iskenderun was founded on land formed by sediments carried by the sea and by streams descending from the Amanus Mountains. These geological processes produced extensive marshes and continually pushed the coastline seaward. While these planetary processes sustained a dynamic marsh ecology that actively constrained human habitation, they also created a naturally sheltered anchorage that attracted maritime interest. Fueled by expanding international trade, British efforts to establish faster communication routes to India, and Ottoman ambitions to civilize both land and population, Iskenderun was repeatedly subjected to drainage schemes under global pressure across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and was gradually forced into being a town despite persistent environmental resistance.
This article maps out physical imprints of the 1851 canal project on Iskenderun’s land, as well as the gradual growth of the town’s built environment and its population in the 1850s. While doing so it also seeks to trace the global and empire-wide dynamics that forced Iskenderun into being.
24 March 2026
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CET
Behind Closed Doors and Windows: Constructing the Domestic Interior in Greece,
1880–1920
THODORIS CHALVATZOGLOU
National Technical University of Athens
Respondent: TBA
“My Sister Penelope’s Room” Athina N. Saripolou, June 1882, watercolor, 38 × 30.5 cm. Private Collection of Athina Angelopoulou. Reproduced from Athina Saripolou-Liva: A 19th-Century Athenian Painter. Athens: Bastas–Plessas.
The scarcity of visual sources depicting urban domestic interiors in Greece from the late 19th to the early 20th century became apparent to me at the very beginning of my research. A few surviving
photographs and some scattered studies on furniture offered partial insights into spatial organization, materials, and furnishings. These allowed me to sketch a rough picture of how rooms evolved during
the period I was studying. Yet, what remained missing was a narrative—an image of how these spaces were inhabited, and by whom.
Some answers emerged with the discovery of a series of housekeeping manuals aimed at young women, at future housewives. The first, published in 1885, proved particularly revealing: such guides prescribed in detail nearly every aspect of domestic life, from cooking and hygiene to the construction and furnishing of the home. A comparative analysis of these texts provided a clearer perspective on the domestic interior, though I still had to ask to whom exactly these manuals referred. Moreover, I needed numerical data on the furniture and objects that made up an actual household of the period.
Unexpectedly, a series of legal documents—specifically dowry contracts—helped fill this gap. The dowry system, deeply embedded in Greek society, required women to bring property into marriage. The contracts I examined contained precise inventories of household furnishings, cooking utensils, and clothing allocated to brides by their families. These documents provided invaluable data for reconstructing the image of the domestic interior in which a newly married couple would live.
This paper outlines a research methodology for studying the history of the domestic interior through non-architectural texts. By drawing on disciplines such as demography, the history of emotions, and family studies, the image of what happened behind closed doors and windows becomes significantly clearer.
Some answers emerged with the discovery of a series of housekeeping manuals aimed at young women, at future housewives. The first, published in 1885, proved particularly revealing: such guides prescribed in detail nearly every aspect of domestic life, from cooking and hygiene to the construction and furnishing of the home. A comparative analysis of these texts provided a clearer perspective on the domestic interior, though I still had to ask to whom exactly these manuals referred. Moreover, I needed numerical data on the furniture and objects that made up an actual household of the period.
Unexpectedly, a series of legal documents—specifically dowry contracts—helped fill this gap. The dowry system, deeply embedded in Greek society, required women to bring property into marriage. The contracts I examined contained precise inventories of household furnishings, cooking utensils, and clothing allocated to brides by their families. These documents provided invaluable data for reconstructing the image of the domestic interior in which a newly married couple would live.
This paper outlines a research methodology for studying the history of the domestic interior through non-architectural texts. By drawing on disciplines such as demography, the history of emotions, and family studies, the image of what happened behind closed doors and windows becomes significantly clearer.
***
Small spaces of Morocco: Rooftop Terraces, Women and the Colonial Gaze
ZINAB HIMEUR
National School of Architecture Rabat
Respondent: TBA
Jean Benjamin Constant – Women on rooftop terraces Tangier 1872 - Copyright Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal (Canada) This paper proposes a micro-historical reading of colonial Morocco through an overlooked architectural space: the rooftop terrace. Typically relegated to narrative interstices or treated as mere backdrops, rooftop terraces rarely emerge as significant spatial sites in their own right.
Building upon Swati Chattopadhyay’s work “Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire”, this study explores how these elevated spaces were visually and culturally constructed and reconstructed, not only through urban planning and architectural form, but also within colonial literature and art, in Morocco under the French Protectorate (1912–1956).
This paper performs the archeology of these spaces, tracing how terraces mediated the encounter between colonial observers and local observed. It analyzes rooftops as thresholds between private indigenous life and the imperial gaze, where bodily visibility, modesty, and urban power relations converged. By shifting the scale from monuments to rooftops, from state plans to domestic margins, this study reveals how the Medina’s roofscape engaged in spatial politics, not only of colonial hegemony and exoticization, but also of anticolonial care and resistance.
Ultimately, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how minor spaces shaped the intimate geographies of the French colonial order, offering new ways to read colonialism, resistance and care in the architectural margins.
Building upon Swati Chattopadhyay’s work “Small Spaces: Recasting the Architecture of Empire”, this study explores how these elevated spaces were visually and culturally constructed and reconstructed, not only through urban planning and architectural form, but also within colonial literature and art, in Morocco under the French Protectorate (1912–1956).
This paper performs the archeology of these spaces, tracing how terraces mediated the encounter between colonial observers and local observed. It analyzes rooftops as thresholds between private indigenous life and the imperial gaze, where bodily visibility, modesty, and urban power relations converged. By shifting the scale from monuments to rooftops, from state plans to domestic margins, this study reveals how the Medina’s roofscape engaged in spatial politics, not only of colonial hegemony and exoticization, but also of anticolonial care and resistance.
Ultimately, this research contributes to a broader understanding of how minor spaces shaped the intimate geographies of the French colonial order, offering new ways to read colonialism, resistance and care in the architectural margins.
7 April 2026
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CET
Mediating Architecture:
An Institutional Study of Knowledge Production and Dissemination at the
Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1979 - 1999
NATÁLIA CORREIA BRANDÃO
Technical University of Munich
Respondent: TBA
Inaugural Exhibition “Photography and Architecture: 1839–1939”, 1982. Curator: Richard Pare, CCA. Credit: Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.
By involving wider audiences, cultural institutions such as architectural centers and museums have increasingly settled themselves as spaces for the production and dissemination of architectural knowledge beyond the academic world. In this thesis, the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA, hereafter) is analysed as a cultural institution in relation to its activities of exhibiting, publishing, collecting and researching architecture. In this direction, the archive is the common ground on which – or from which – the activities and roles to be analysed take place; it is the conductor of the communication between the interior (the discipline related professionals and activities) and exterior (the broad public). It is from the activation of the archival structure that the aforementioned domains take place, and from which they are translated into exchanges with a broader audience.
Oral history, literature review and archival research are the methodological tools in this elaboration, which are of help to elucidate the broad question of how cultural institutions dedicated to architecture produce architectural knowledge in the interface between the interior and the exterior of the discipline. Specifically, the question is hoped to be answered through the institutional analysis of the CCA, identified as one of the most relevant cultural institutions with an architectural collection, and with a gap in the literature related to its critical analysis in scientific publications. The starting point of the thesis is its act of foundation in 1979 in Montreal by architect and philanthropist Phyllis Lambert, and goes over the two decades in which she acted as founder and president.
Overall, this presentation aims to present the overall structure of the thesis, its methodology and recent findings.
Oral history, literature review and archival research are the methodological tools in this elaboration, which are of help to elucidate the broad question of how cultural institutions dedicated to architecture produce architectural knowledge in the interface between the interior and the exterior of the discipline. Specifically, the question is hoped to be answered through the institutional analysis of the CCA, identified as one of the most relevant cultural institutions with an architectural collection, and with a gap in the literature related to its critical analysis in scientific publications. The starting point of the thesis is its act of foundation in 1979 in Montreal by architect and philanthropist Phyllis Lambert, and goes over the two decades in which she acted as founder and president.
Overall, this presentation aims to present the overall structure of the thesis, its methodology and recent findings.
***
“Worlding” on Display: The Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale
(2006-2023)
YARAN ZHANG
UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER
Respondent: TBA
The entrance to the Chinese Pavilion at the Arsenale, photo by Yaran Zhang, 2023. Since its inaugural presentation in 2006, the Chinese Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale has
become a strategic platform for soft power projection, cultural diplomacy and national self-representation within architectural discourse. This research argues that the Chinese Pavilion offers a
valuable lens through which to understand China’s presentation of its architectural culture on the international stage. More broadly, it examines how China’s involvement in the cultural platform of the Biennale reflects an ongoing practice of “worlding”—a method defined by American anthropologist
Aihwa Ong—through which non-Western actors actively position themselves within and contribute to the global order. In this context, international exhibitions function as channels of soft intervention,
allowing China to integrate into and engage with the global cultural landscape.
Drawing on archival research, oral history, and media analysis, this research investigates the curatorial strategies, theme choices, and exhibit formats of the Chinese Pavilion between 2006 and 2023. It identifies three phases in China’s participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale: Phase I (1991-2006) relied on symbolic motifs, prioritising visibility over narrative depth; Phase II (2008-2016) marked a shift toward critical engagement with social and architectural issues; Phase III (2018-2023) reflects intensified state involvement, characterised by immersive technologies and large-scale construction displays. These curatorial changes closely align with national policies over the past three decades, including Jiang Zemin’s “Bring in and Go Global” in 1996, Hu Jintao’s “Stimulate Cultural Creativity” in 2007, and Xi Jinping’s “Tell a Good China Story” in 2013.
By examining the Chinese Pavilion within the uneven geography of national pavilions at the Giardini and Arsenale in Venice, this study reveals the Biennale’s character—part art fair, part museum, and part geopolitical tool—through which China negotiates its evolving cultural identity and projects soft power on the global stage.
Drawing on archival research, oral history, and media analysis, this research investigates the curatorial strategies, theme choices, and exhibit formats of the Chinese Pavilion between 2006 and 2023. It identifies three phases in China’s participation at the Venice Architecture Biennale: Phase I (1991-2006) relied on symbolic motifs, prioritising visibility over narrative depth; Phase II (2008-2016) marked a shift toward critical engagement with social and architectural issues; Phase III (2018-2023) reflects intensified state involvement, characterised by immersive technologies and large-scale construction displays. These curatorial changes closely align with national policies over the past three decades, including Jiang Zemin’s “Bring in and Go Global” in 1996, Hu Jintao’s “Stimulate Cultural Creativity” in 2007, and Xi Jinping’s “Tell a Good China Story” in 2013.
By examining the Chinese Pavilion within the uneven geography of national pavilions at the Giardini and Arsenale in Venice, this study reveals the Biennale’s character—part art fair, part museum, and part geopolitical tool—through which China negotiates its evolving cultural identity and projects soft power on the global stage.
21 April 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Cultivating Urbanism
TITHI SANYAL
University of Virginia
Respondent: TBA
University of Virginia
Respondent: TBA
Detroit's Agro-urbanity,
Detroit, USA, 2024 (Image Source: Tithi Sanyal)
For more than 130 years, Detroit has been at the forefront of urban gardening and agricultural initiatives in the United States. While French colonists established Ribbon Farms along the Detroit River in the 1700s, modern urban agriculture in Detroit has been shaped by economic struggles, population decline, ubiquity of vacant land, and food insecurity, starting with the national economic depression of 1893–97. Today, there is widespread adoption of Agroecology- “the science, practice and movement” of conservative agriculture in the city, witnessed through the proliferation of over 2280 networked urban farms and gardens. These land-based projects are enabled by initiatives and policies like the Keep Growing Detroit’s Garden Resource Program, Urban Agricultural Ordinance (2013), and the Detroit Black Farmer Land Fund (2019), which advocate for food sovereignty, particularly within African American communities and are forming an agroecological apparatus.
This talk will discuss the forces reshaping Detroit’s identity from a post-industrial city into an Agrarian City. It will demonstrate how Actor-Network Theory can serve as a methodology to examine the history of Detroit's agroecological landscape, while also examining the motivation and agency of the actors involved in the network. It will situate Detroit’s agroecological landscape within the broader trajectory of urban agriculture, highlighting its influence on urban planning and governance since the economic depression of 1893–97. At the center of this inquiry lies the question of how actants interact and what outcomes arise from these interactions that inform urban planning, design, and governance.
This talk will discuss the forces reshaping Detroit’s identity from a post-industrial city into an Agrarian City. It will demonstrate how Actor-Network Theory can serve as a methodology to examine the history of Detroit's agroecological landscape, while also examining the motivation and agency of the actors involved in the network. It will situate Detroit’s agroecological landscape within the broader trajectory of urban agriculture, highlighting its influence on urban planning and governance since the economic depression of 1893–97. At the center of this inquiry lies the question of how actants interact and what outcomes arise from these interactions that inform urban planning, design, and governance.
***
Presence, Calibration and Failure: Spatial and Knowledge Strategies in the Co-production of Drainage Infrastructures.
ALESSIO MAZZARO
Politecnico di Torino
Respondent: TBA
Politecnico di Torino
Respondent: TBA
Workshop of Radionovela, July 2025, Colonia Culturas de Mexico.
The peripheries of Sao Paulo and Mexico City are territories where the alterations of water bodies, urban development, and the conflict between opposing interests and visions are so strong it may be impossible to conceive of a definitive solution to the problems related to water. Drawing on fieldwork experience and participatory art activities with inhabitants in two different case studies, this contribution examines the dynamics of co-producing knowledge and infrastructures through the categories of failure, presence, and calibration. The territory is approached as a stage where, in response to water management challenges, actions are rehearsed and revised—together with the public—by observing and learning from their effects.
In Torresmo (BZ), an informal settlement divided by a stream whose channelization increased the incidence of flooding, failure (of a drainage infrastructure, of state technicians and of a university laboratory) generates knowledge and materializes the forces at play in the territory. Here, through a list of doubts and questions (triggered by artistic activities) about a future lamination basin, residents engage with the Secretariat of Infrastructure (SIURB), contributing to exerting pressure and to voicing alternative ways of managing water in the territory.
In Colonia Culturas de México (MX), a settlement at the edge of the former Lake Chalco, a local collective dealing with the construction of a new wastewater pipe, participates in the making of the infrastructure: being present (Taylor 2020) with their bodies and questions in the construction site and conducting a practical inquiry (Dewey 1938). Monitoring in a Whatsapp group, water level and issues in the infrastructure elements, they participate in the calibration of the drainage infrastructure. Here, calibration, that is usually a technical/engineering procedure oriented toward a predetermined outcome, becomes epistemic and a collective process of relational adjustment (Latour 2005) among heterogeneous actors (engineers, inhabitants, infrastructural elements).
In Torresmo (BZ), an informal settlement divided by a stream whose channelization increased the incidence of flooding, failure (of a drainage infrastructure, of state technicians and of a university laboratory) generates knowledge and materializes the forces at play in the territory. Here, through a list of doubts and questions (triggered by artistic activities) about a future lamination basin, residents engage with the Secretariat of Infrastructure (SIURB), contributing to exerting pressure and to voicing alternative ways of managing water in the territory.
In Colonia Culturas de México (MX), a settlement at the edge of the former Lake Chalco, a local collective dealing with the construction of a new wastewater pipe, participates in the making of the infrastructure: being present (Taylor 2020) with their bodies and questions in the construction site and conducting a practical inquiry (Dewey 1938). Monitoring in a Whatsapp group, water level and issues in the infrastructure elements, they participate in the calibration of the drainage infrastructure. Here, calibration, that is usually a technical/engineering procedure oriented toward a predetermined outcome, becomes epistemic and a collective process of relational adjustment (Latour 2005) among heterogeneous actors (engineers, inhabitants, infrastructural elements).
5 May 2026
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Unsettling the Typology:
Mappila Muslim Women’s Reimaginings of Gendered Domestic Space
(Kerala, India)
AKMA NAZAR
University of Westminster
Respondent: TBA
University of Westminster
Respondent: TBA
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 spatia 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 architectura 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 spatia 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 architectura historiography and feminist spatial theory.
***
Swiss Safe Space Imaginaries: archetypes of security, stability and abundance
KHENSANI JURCZOK-DE KLERK
ETH Zürich
Respondent: TBA
ETH Zürich
Respondent: TBA
former Swiss artillery fortress Sasso da Pigna at the St. Gotthard mountain pass, which was built during World War II. (Arnd Wiegmann/Reuters)
This presentation interrogates how “safe space” is (mis)translated in Switzerland, where imaginaries of safety are framed by archetypes of security, stability, and abundance. Emerging from social movements and later absorbed into broader cultural discourse, the term safe space has been widely mobilised yet rarely examined through the lens of architectural history. Within the Swiss context, imaginaries of safety manifest spatially in emblematic forms: the alpine mountain as fortress, the bunker carved into rock as guarantor of neutrality, the nuclear family as domestic stabiliser, and the bank vault—ironically called a “safe”—as the ultimate emblem of abundance. Together, these archetypes sustain a postcard image of national order and prosperity while delimiting alternative, culturally situated understandings of safety in an increasingly diverse society.
Yet these same archetypes are deeply entangled with colonial and capitalist histories: the storage of Nazi gold in Swiss banks during World War II; the financial entanglements with apartheid-era extraction economies in South Africa that underwrote Swiss domestic stability in the 1970s; and the reliance on seasonally restricted Italian migrant labour to construct the very infrastructures of safety during the late nineteenth century. These converging histories expose how Swiss safe space imaginaries both idealise national stability and simultaneously suppress other modes of being, belonging, and spatial imagination.
This presentation considers how these inherited imaginaries produce a paradoxical condition: safety as an anchored ideal built upon histories of exclusion, and yet, for many, a continually unstable and floating experience. By reading these archetypes against Black feminist articulations of safe space from the 1980s-2000s, it argues for an intersectional and socio-spatial understanding of safety that recognises and unsettles the structural exclusions on which Swiss stability has historically depended.
Yet these same archetypes are deeply entangled with colonial and capitalist histories: the storage of Nazi gold in Swiss banks during World War II; the financial entanglements with apartheid-era extraction economies in South Africa that underwrote Swiss domestic stability in the 1970s; and the reliance on seasonally restricted Italian migrant labour to construct the very infrastructures of safety during the late nineteenth century. These converging histories expose how Swiss safe space imaginaries both idealise national stability and simultaneously suppress other modes of being, belonging, and spatial imagination.
This presentation considers how these inherited imaginaries produce a paradoxical condition: safety as an anchored ideal built upon histories of exclusion, and yet, for many, a continually unstable and floating experience. By reading these archetypes against Black feminist articulations of safe space from the 1980s-2000s, it argues for an intersectional and socio-spatial understanding of safety that recognises and unsettles the structural exclusions on which Swiss stability has historically depended.
19 May 2026
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CET
Architectures of Anticipation: Illustrated with Three Acts from Wartime Turkey
ELIF KAYMAZ
Middle East Technical University
Respondent: TBA
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.
***
From Fences to Statutes: Privacy, Property, and Self-Governance in Post-Detonation Los Alamos, 1955-1965
LEALLA SOLOMON
Princeton University
Respondent: TBA
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.