***

19 May 2026
8:00 AM EDT / 2:00 PM CEST

Architectures of Anticipation: Illustrated with Three Acts from Wartime Turkey

ELIF KAYMAZ
Middle East Technical University

Respondent: Cansu Degirmencioglu, Technical University of Munich


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)





***

From Fences to Statutes: Privacy, Property, and Self-Governance in Post-Detonation Los Alamos, 1955-1965

LEALLA SOLOMON
Princeton University

Respondent: Heather Jahrling, Princeton University

The Zia Company Electric Utility, 1961, Cowan Collection, Los Alamos Historical Society Archives, Los Alamos, New Mexico, Community, Box 6, Folder 36.

Detroit's Agro-urbanity, Detroit, USA, 2024 (Image Source: Tithi Sanyal)

***

Presence, Calibration and Failure: Spatial and Knowledge Strategies in the Co-production of Drainage Infrastructures.

Workshop of Radionovela, July 2025, Colonia Culturas de Mexico.

7 April 2026
*8:00 AM EDT / 2:00 PM CEST

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: Masamichi Tamura, Institute of Science Tokyo



Inaugural Exhibition “Photography and Architecture: 1839–1939”, 1982. Curator: Richard Pare, CCA. Credit: Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

PAST TALKS 2025

---

2 December 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Porta-Kitchen:
How kitchens travel across roads, through memories, and with hands

ANNA SWITAJ, FEYSA POETRY
The Bartlett UCL

Respondent: Shen He, ETH Zurich


Porta-Kitchen: Collaborative project by Feysa Poetry and Anna Switaj; the making of the moving kitchen: translation & foodprints in motion; photo collage: Feysa Poetry, 2025.


Anna Switaj and Feysa Poetry explore the kitchen not as a fixed, domestic room but as a mobile, relational space open to interpretation. In this project kitchens move across geographies, through time, and between people to reimagine them in new intimate and cultural settings. Through two distinct approaches, We investigate how acts of care performed through cooking and travel shift when uprooted from their original contexts.
Anna Switaj moves her kitchen in an RV, travelling from the UK to Ukraine. Along the way, she cooks, exchanges recipes, and hosts meals with people met en route. Her kitchen becomes a nomadic archive, folding in new rituals, tools, and ingredients with each border crossed.
Feysa Poetry transports her kitchen through the post, mailing her familial recipe from Indonesia to participants with culturally diverse backgrounds across the UK. Each recipient reimagines the dish within the limitations (and possibilities) of their own domesticity and cultural familiarity, generating rich translations in taste, technique, and memory.
Together, these movements examine how food, memory, and care are carried, adapted, and kept alive through motion and relational exchange. In this session we are interested in the site of taste, resilience, and cultural continuity. We reinterpret the memory of domestic labour as a recipe-scape: a collection of co-authored documents adapted and collectively owned by many. We treat the kitchen as a shared, decentralised space of knowledge where cooking methods, stories and personal hacks are exchanged freely, creating a living archive rooted in everyday practice.

---

18 November 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Ambition and Spectacle:
The Architectural Patronage of Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt

RYAN J. MITCHELL
Temple University

Respondent: Damla Göre, ETH Zurich


Mehmed Ali receiving guests at Shubra Palace in Cairo by Pascal Coste (1787-1879) in Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826. Image: MIT Dome.


Mehmed Ali’s nearly forty-year reign as Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805 until his death in 1849 profoundly transformed the province’s visual and architectural culture, which were critical tools in his modernizing initiatives that allowed Egypt to emerge as Istanbul’s primary opponent in cultural, aesthetic, and political arenas until the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. This talk discusses ongoing research conducted across Egypt, Greece, and Turkey that feeds a broad, comparative investigation of Mehmed Ali’s building activities in the Eastern Mediterranean. Through analysis of religious structures, palaces, industrial buildings, infrastructural projects, and institutions such as hospitals and schools, the project reconsiders definitions of center and periphery in imperial visual discourses, as well as addresses aspects of Egyptian visual culture that remain highly understudied in art historical scholarship. In addition, it contextualizes Mehmed Ali’s architectural patronage within the broader field of Ottoman architectural history in a period when much of the empire’s most dynamic building projects could be found in its provinces, often the product of powerful ayan families’ ambitions. Analyzing Mehmed Ali's patronage of such projects reveals how the governor's policies, singular will, and the socio-cultural milieu that emerged under his auspices relied heavily on visual media that allowed him to succeed in his dynasty-building ambitions.

***

Anxiety, Modernity, and Worldmaking: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Traveling Exhibitions of Brazilian Architecture

CATARINA FLAKSMAN
Harvard University

Respondent: Ciro Miguel, ETH Zurich


Installation photograph of brasilien baut exhibition, Zurich, Switzerland, 1954 (Museu Histórico e Diplomático / ERERIO / MRE / Mapoteca).


Between 1952 and 1960, over twenty-five exhibitions of Brazilian architecture traveled to cities around the world, from Buenos Aires to Tokyo, passing through Bogota, Lisbon, London, Zurich, Paris, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, Brussels, and beyond. Organized by Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or Itamaraty, the exhibitions were part of an ambitious program to promote a modern imaginary of Brazil abroad, in turn constructing a transnational network of public and private agents and institutions. These traveling architecture exhibitions became a key instrument of cultural diplomacy, especially within the national developmentalist project that marked the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961). Drawing from my ongoing dissertation, this paper investigates the international projection of Brazil’s modern architecture through a series of traveling exhibitions, shedding light on an orchestrated cultural, political, and aesthetic project of identity construction highly dependent on mechanisms of display.The investigation of these previously unstudied exhibitions suggests that architecture played a fundamental role in the cultural politics of Brazil, at home and abroad. Architecture exhibitions became a medium to construct and disseminate images and narratives aligned with the interests of the state. Based on extensive research primarily conducted in the archives of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the study of the exhibitions and the networks they established offers new readings of the intricate relationship between architecture, media, and politics at a time of geopolitical change during the Cold War. As a key player in Brazil’s modernization process, modern architecture was first mobilized as a tool for nation-building and, later, as part of a worldmaking project to reimagine the country’s position in the world. The display of architecture became a critical mechanism developed by the state apparatus to manifest Brazil’s anxiety to become modern, which would eventually materialize in 1960 with the construction of the country’s new capital, Brasília.

---

20 May 2025
08:30 AM EST / 14:30 PM CEST

DocTalks x MoMA

Field Work: Tina Modotti and the Free Schools of Agriculture, México, 1926-1932

NIKKI MOORE
Wake Forest University

Respondent: Adam Jasper, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Tina Modotti, Pandurang Khankhoje y el aspects del campo de experimentación de la Escuela Libre de Agricultura Emiliano Zapata / Pandurang Khankhoje and the look of the experimental fields of the Emiliano Zapata Free School of Agriculture, 1930. Source: Fototeca Nacional INAH, Pachuca, Mexico.

In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed two men in a dry field holding a bedsheet behind an ascending row of maize plants in Mexico’s Central Valley. On the left stands a student from one of the region’s Indigenous communal farming villages; on the right, India’s ex-pat and México’s first geneticist, Pandurang Khankhoje. One of fifty images recently bequeathed by Dr. Savitri Sawhney to the Fototeca Nacional in Pachuca, México, this little-known work by Modotti, Teozinte (Euchlaena Mexicana), (1928), documents a series of experiments in which decolonial Indigenous agricultural science and art activism were made one. Each newly bequeathed image marks an uncharted moment in Mexico’s scientific, aesthetic, and political postrevolutionary development: namely, the emergence of thirty Free Schools of Agriculture. Supported by Mexican modernists Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero and Modotti, and run by First Nation’s teachers, the Free Schools were an educational organization that centered Indigenous land restitution goals via demonstrations of agricultural abundance, self-sufficiency, and what we now call environmental justice.

Too often seen as a passive eye documenting the work of others in the Mexican avant-garde who tokenized ancient First Nations aesthetics, this paper argues that with the addition of Dr. Sawhney’s collection both Modotti and her photography emerge as protagonists championing a complex visual politics of living postrevolutionary Indigenous agency and thriving. As such, Modotti’s work with the Free Schools of Agriculture necessitates a rethinking of the photographer’s oeuvre, as she leveraged her lens, published photos, and circulated prints to reclaim the image of the region’s First Nations from the photographic categories of discrimination they had endured in the press, while celebrating each community’s stake in México’s modern future.

***

A Map of Hong Kong’s Hidden Music Peripheries: Post -1980s

DIEGO CARO
University of Navarra

Respondent: Adam Jasper, Chinese University of Hong Kong


Music studio located in an industrial building, Hong Kong. Source: Diego Caro.


Floor 26 of Ho King Commercial Centre in Yau Ma Tei, the elevator stops. At the end of the corridor, the sound of a heavy metal band, detuned screams buffered by the cracked plywood door of a tiny music studio. Outdated factory buildings in Kwun Tong, industrial architecture gradually surrounded by new commercial and residential complexes; their precarious wait for urban renewal has offered an opportunity for young musicians to establish music studios, classrooms, or improvised bedrooms where music and teenage discoveries mingle with the noise of machinery. Tiny, closed shops with an infinitude of colorful objects that repose after a long day of sales, evoking a sense of initiation into Hong Kong’s underground music scene. The queue is the origin of casual conversations around an orange metallic cube that turns black, green, or purple in the inside, where the combination of sounds and lights acts as a social condenser via the affective power of music.

This research project maps the musical peripheries that coexists with the boisterous rhythm of Hong Kong from within. It encompasses visiting and studying spaces for music, drawing and photographing these often ephemeral venues, analyzing them in reference to the city´s real estate dynamics and sociopolitical context, interviewing the main stakeholders, and reading the stories behind the music to decipher the role of art production in the current context of Hong Kong. By wandering around the spatial networks formed by hundreds of musicians scattered in unexpected secluded venues around the city, this research seeks an alternative understanding of the diverse struggles over placeness in the city through the lenses of emergent culture, showcasing artist’s “tactics” to counter the commodification of creativity in a tightly controlled bureaucratic society.

---

6 May 2025
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CEST

Cruel Opportunities in the Apartheid City:
Meantime Designs and Public Housing in Cape Town

LAURIN BAUMGARDT
Rice University

Respondent: Jessica Ilunga, Keio University


Plans and diagrams of RDP’s predecessor apartheid-era model, also colloquially known as “matchboxes” or as the NE51 series of low-cost houses—“NE” standing for “non-European,” “51” referring to the year of design, followed by a prototype number. Source: Elk, Clifford (Eds.) Metropolis: Architectural Students Congress, University of the Witwatersrand (April 1986).

As one of the most ambitious national public housing programs in the world, post-apartheid South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) produced millions of standardized, non-participatory and non-adaptable, freestanding brick houses, to all known as RDP houses. Three decades into South Africa’s new democracy, it has become most apparent that RDP housing has perpetuated apartheid’s monofunctional urban environments, and that formerly disenfranchised black communities were at no stage given a chance to negotiate and participate in the design and construction process of the RDP model. Although largely silent, absent, or sidelined from public housing policy and design discussions, architects and other built environment professionals and activist collectives have not only strongly criticized RDP’s minimal and fixed design and standard housing model, but have also proposed and circulated alternative visions, imaginaries, and spatial practices to challenge South Africa’s most rigid and segregated housing environment. By researching how architectural professionals, academics, activists, and residents viewed and evaluated the RDP house, and aimed to move beyond it, this talk not only contributes to understanding the microhistories of South Africa’s housing programs but also to how professionals and urban dwellers are rethinking the critical potential of design worldwide, and how they are addressing this challenging 21st century moment that desperately demands new socialities, housing designs, and resource distribution. To address the urgent housing needs of Cape Town’s most vulnerable communities, who continue to be caught in a state of meantime limbo, this talk introduces the notion of “meantime designs” that functioned as social and political counter- imaginaries, and as negotiating devices to discuss concrete alternatives to South Africa’s long failed and exclusionary public housing standards. “Meantime designs,” however, not only challenge but also run the risk of further perpetuating spatial inequalities and exclusionary housing politics.

***

Images of Modern Switzerland.
Aerial Photographs of Walter Mittelholzer

LISA HENICZ
Università della Svizzera Italiana

Respondent: Elif Kaymaz,
Middle East Technical University


Junkers plane above Zürich-Sihlfeld, Walter Mittelholzer, 1925.
ETH Library Zurich, Image Archive / LBS_MH01-004777.

After the First World War, a coinciding of technological improvements within the fields of photography, aviation, and print media facilitated a surge in civil aerial photography. My dissertation studies the impact of aerial photography on urban design and architecture in the first half of the 20th century, with the Swiss aeronaut Walter Mittelholzer as its central figure.

By tracing Mittelholzer's life and oeuvre, the doctoral project delves into the multifaceted aspects of his contributions to urban planning and the documentation of urban development. Through the exploration of his meticulously captured images of Swiss industrial complexes, towns, and infrastructure, I investigate the role of aerial photography as a tool for urban planning. By analyzing the intentions behind commissioning aerial photographs and their subsequent use in planning practices, the research project seeks to elucidate Mittelholzer's impact on shaping the Swiss self-image and contextualize the Swiss developments internationally. Furthermore, it scrutinizes Mittelholzer's agency as both an author and aeronaut, examining his relationships with contemporaries and industrialists as well as the public reception of his work.

The examination of Mittelholzer’s aerial photographs proceeds from two opposing directions: his diaries, notes and travel reports (the documentation and conception) on one hand and contemporary publications on architecture and urbanism (the reception) on the other. Selected case studies will exemplify my investigations and archival findings.

In addition to analyzing the impact of Mittelholzer’s photographs, I contextualize his figure internationally by comparing his activity, his impact, and his reception with the ones of his contemporaries. In conclusion, my research documents Mittelholzer’s aerial photography as a catalyst for urban planning and modernization in Switzerland. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of aerial photography in shaping urban landscapes and national identities during the inter-war period.

---

6 May 2025
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CEST

Cruel Opportunities in the Apartheid City:
Meantime Designs and Public Housing in Cape Town

LAURIN BAUMGARDT
Rice University

Respondent: Jessica Ilunga, Keio University


Plans and diagrams of RDP’s predecessor apartheid-era model, also colloquially known as “matchboxes” or as the NE51 series of low-cost houses—“NE” standing for “non-European,” “51” referring to the year of design, followed by a prototype number. Source: Elk, Clifford (Eds.) Metropolis: Architectural Students Congress, University of the Witwatersrand (April 1986).

As one of the most ambitious national public housing programs in the world, post-apartheid South Africa’s Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) produced millions of standardized, non-participatory and non-adaptable, freestanding brick houses, to all known as RDP houses. Three decades into South Africa’s new democracy, it has become most apparent that RDP housing has perpetuated apartheid’s monofunctional urban environments, and that formerly disenfranchised black communities were at no stage given a chance to negotiate and participate in the design and construction process of the RDP model. Although largely silent, absent, or sidelined from public housing policy and design discussions, architects and other built environment professionals and activist collectives have not only strongly criticized RDP’s minimal and fixed design and standard housing model, but have also proposed and circulated alternative visions, imaginaries, and spatial practices to challenge South Africa’s most rigid and segregated housing environment. By researching how architectural professionals, academics, activists, and residents viewed and evaluated the RDP house, and aimed to move beyond it, this talk not only contributes to understanding the microhistories of South Africa’s housing programs but also to how professionals and urban dwellers are rethinking the critical potential of design worldwide, and how they are addressing this challenging 21st century moment that desperately demands new socialities, housing designs, and resource distribution. To address the urgent housing needs of Cape Town’s most vulnerable communities, who continue to be caught in a state of meantime limbo, this talk introduces the notion of “meantime designs” that functioned as social and political counter- imaginaries, and as negotiating devices to discuss concrete alternatives to South Africa’s long failed and exclusionary public housing standards. “Meantime designs,” however, not only challenge but also run the risk of further perpetuating spatial inequalities and exclusionary housing politics.

***

Images of Modern Switzerland.
Aerial Photographs of Walter Mittelholzer

LISA HENICZ
Università della Svizzera Italiana

Respondent: Elif Kaymaz,
Middle East Technical University


Junkers plane above Zürich-Sihlfeld, Walter Mittelholzer, 1925.
ETH Library Zurich, Image Archive / LBS_MH01-004777.

After the First World War, a coinciding of technological improvements within the fields of photography, aviation, and print media facilitated a surge in civil aerial photography. My dissertation studies the impact of aerial photography on urban design and architecture in the first half of the 20th century, with the Swiss aeronaut Walter Mittelholzer as its central figure.

By tracing Mittelholzer's life and oeuvre, the doctoral project delves into the multifaceted aspects of his contributions to urban planning and the documentation of urban development. Through the exploration of his meticulously captured images of Swiss industrial complexes, towns, and infrastructure, I investigate the role of aerial photography as a tool for urban planning. By analyzing the intentions behind commissioning aerial photographs and their subsequent use in planning practices, the research project seeks to elucidate Mittelholzer's impact on shaping the Swiss self-image and contextualize the Swiss developments internationally. Furthermore, it scrutinizes Mittelholzer's agency as both an author and aeronaut, examining his relationships with contemporaries and industrialists as well as the public reception of his work.

The examination of Mittelholzer’s aerial photographs proceeds from two opposing directions: his diaries, notes and travel reports (the documentation and conception) on one hand and contemporary publications on architecture and urbanism (the reception) on the other. Selected case studies will exemplify my investigations and archival findings.

In addition to analyzing the impact of Mittelholzer’s photographs, I contextualize his figure internationally by comparing his activity, his impact, and his reception with the ones of his contemporaries. In conclusion, my research documents Mittelholzer’s aerial photography as a catalyst for urban planning and modernization in Switzerland. Ultimately, this dissertation aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the role of aerial photography in shaping urban landscapes and national identities during the inter-war period.

---

29 April 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CEST

City in the Face of Urban Scarcity: Navigating Urban Form and Architectural Responses to Resource Challenges in Tirana (1995-2010)

ANTEA LEKA
Technical University of Munich

Respondent: Saimir Kristo, Barleti University


Pyramid of Tirana. Source: Elie Gardner for The New York Times.


Current challenges such as rapid urbanization, resource depletion, and socio-economicinequalities are pressuring cities to rethink their development strategies and administrative approaches. The research project explores the future of urban transitions with a focus on scarcity, analyzing its impact on spatial development in European cities. The main goal is to assess administration policies, planning strategies, and spatial development from 1995 to 2020 through the lens of scarcity. The study considers political, economic, demographic, and social factors aswell as community engagement. It is divided into three main parts: understanding the concept ofurban scarcity, case studies, and recommendations.

A critical dimension of this research is its relation to environmental justice, particularly how scarcity exacerbates inequities in urban environments. Scarcity disproportionately affects vulnerable populations, leading to unequal access to resources such as water, green spaces, and housing. This imbalance reinforces socio-economic inequalities, posing ethical and governance challenges for cities.

The case of Tirana, Albania, and its latest developments offers a unique perspective within this study. Rapid urbanization and unregulated development in Tirana, especially after the fall of communism, have created deep-seated spatial inequalities. Informal settlements on the city's periphery, lack of green infrastructure, and uneven access to basic services like water and waste management illustrate how scarcity-driven urban transitions can undermine environmental justice. At the same time, recent urban regeneration projects, such as the transformation of Skanderbeg Square, show the city's efforts toward addressing these inequalities, though theirimpact remains uneven across socio-economic groups.

The research aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on future cities amidst climate change and poly-crisis by addressing how scarcity and its consequences shape urban development, what actions are taken at public and community levels, and the importance of resilience and collaboration for sustainable urban futures in Europe.

***

The Film “Small Crime” as a Lens on Τhirassia’s Marginalized Communities and Environmental Justice

ANGELIKI BARAS
Athens School of Fine Arts

Respondent: Saimir Kristo, Barleti University


Clip from the film ”Small Crime” (2007) by Christos Georgiou presenting the reaction of the two protagonists against the illegal initiative of the local rulers of the island, to exploit a plot in order to create the largest Water Park in the Mediterranean. On the banners are written the slogans “Your water slides elsewhere” and “Pebbles only to those who like them”, expressing in this way the contrast of touristic constructions that alter the natural environment, with the purity of nature that very few will understand. Source: Christos Georgiou.

The film “Small Crime” (2007) by Christos Georgiou, although fictional, depicts with particular sensitivity characteristic everyday situations that occur in the communities of the island of Thirassia. It is an almost “anthropological” approach and outline of the small island of Thirassia, which together with Thira make up the island complex of Santorini. Thirassia is a place that faced and faces problems of survival, while it is exposed to local, national and international crises. The unequal relationship between Thirassia and Thira, both on an economic and socio-political level, is a decisive factor for the course of development of the island, presenting at the same time particular research and even artistic interest.

The paper attempts to use the film “Small Crime” as a tool to present the coexistence of development and depopulation of the island, a coexistence that summarizes the history of development of many places in Greece, shedding light on issues related to irregular practices for tourist exploitation of the island, but also issues of environmental justice. On the one hand, the film offers explanations regarding the stereotype of the “stuck local” that usually accompanies the identity of “small places” like Thirasia. On the other hand, in an inventive way through the plot, it presents the operation to abolish the “authentically traditional” on the altar of profit from tourism, illuminating the invisible competition between touristized Santorini with its luxurious resorts and “deserted” Thirassia with its nudist beaches. The inevitable beauty of Thirassia, with its unique color palette, is not highlighted in the same picturesque way that would happen on a tourist island, but critically, leading thinking in directions that raise debates around the environmental values of a place.

---

15 April 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Jermayne MacAgy:
Shaping Knowledge Through Space

PAMELA BIANCHI
École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Paris-Belleville

Respondent: Ekin Pınar, Middle East Technical University

Exhibition view, Totems Not Taboo. An Exhibition of Primitive Art, curated by Jermayne MacAgy, February 26-March 29, 1959, Cullinan Hall at Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Jermayne MacAgy became the director of the Contemporary Arts Association in Houston in 1955 after having been for the previous 14 years at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco as curator and acting director.

During her four-year tenure, she organized twenty-nine exhibitions that all translated her innovative understanding of museum layout and architecture. “Pioneering curator of modern art […] who managed to ignore design systems — or tried to work outside of systems of taste” (Hopps 2008: 22-24), MacAgy suggested a new comprehension of art history through aninnovative display set-up. Together with Alfred Barr, she was a student of Paul J. Sachs in his training program for art museums at Harvard University. Active in the mid-twentieth century, when, especially in America, a distinct museum and curatorial approach was being defined thanks to the contribution of the de Menils and the Arensbergs, MacAgy embodied the desire of the time to free art and architectural processes from univocal images, formal representations and contemplative acts, proposing a more interdisciplinary idea of creation attentive to the phenomenological experience.

MacAgy called into question the status of the artefact and the common object which she both understood as mnemonic signs of a shared cultural heritage, thus anticipating the topics that would be later developed by Szeeman’s a-historical approach or by the curatorship of Rudi Fuchs and William Rubin. Fostering defamiliarized contexts and settings and understanding the display as a significant gesture meant to mean, she used potted plants, gravel and claybeds, temporary fabric, structural mobile walls and pedestals of different sizes to dramatize the exhibition space.

Yet, today, her work is still unknown to many. Apart from the archives of the Menil Collection inHouston, very little literature from the mid-century exists. No comprehensive historiographical study has been conducted on her work other than a catalogue in 1968, which, however, does not offer any precise critical-analytical study. Consequently, the paper aims to deepen a historical-critical study to inscribe her work into the contemporary debate and eventually start a process of historicization of the central contribution she was able to instil in the museographysystem of the time.


***

Between Idea and Building:
Art, Architecture, and Identity in the Whitney Museum of American Art

LAUREN MCQUISTION
University of Virginia

Respondent: Özgür Esra Kahveci,
Istanbul Technical University


View of Marcel Breuer designed Whitney Museum of American Art (1966).
Image by Lauren McQuistion (2022).

Museums are canonizing machines. As an institutional typology associated with the production of cultural knowledge, museums use their architecture to project institutional authority and permanence in support of activities constructing narratives of shared cultural history. Since its formalization as a museum in New York City in 1930, the Whitney Museum of American Art’s mission has been dedicated to the institutionalization of works by living, American artists. While this priority has acted as a guiding principle, it is also a highly mutable concept which has manifested itself most visibly in the relationship between the Whitney and its architecture. Unlike other museums that have renovated, expanded, and, in some rare cases, demolished and rebuilt architecture, the Whitney has relocated multiple times, using radically contrasting architectural interventions to reinvent itself institutionally.

Each architectural iteration of the Whitney has marked a moment of solidified relations between the museum as an institution, the possibilities for the exhibition and reception of American Art, and the experience of the Whitney by its publics. This position ultimately contradicts the museum’s stated notion that “the Whitney is an idea, not a building”, a bifurcation between the concept of the museum and the museum’s architectural expression that has ultimately had significant consequences for the Whitney’s institutional authority, successes, and critiques over the course of its history.

The Whitney’s architecture does not stand alone as an object of history but is instead a significant component of a still emerging assemblage of people, practices, and objects. The institution cannot be understood without its architecture and vice versa, posing questions regarding the intersection of spatiality and the practices of curating, preserving, and presenting American Art, and by extension, architecture’s role in the formation of “American” cultural identity represented through these processes and facilitated by institutional spaces.

---

25 March 2025
10:00 AM EDT / 3:00 PM CET

TO COVER A MOUND
Post-War Land Governance in and around Berlin's Mass Housing Estates (1945-1990)

ROBIN HUEPPE
ETH

Respondent: Anny Li, Harvard University


Left: Mound Lübarser Höhe by Märkisches Viertel, 1989, Right: Mound Kienberg by Marzahn, 1990 ©Bundesarchiv, Bild 180


Mounds of rubble and waste emerged as companion infrastructures to the housing estates of former East and West Berlin. In the neighborhoods of Marzahn (East) and Märkisches Viertel (West), they conceal a complex narrative of power, resistance, and negotiation in the pursuit of modern urbanization. Architectural histories often depict Berlin's post-war expansion as a disruptive break from the periphery's agro-industrial past, portraying it as an inevitable progression towards grands ensembles. However, they frequently overlook the specific institutions and their actors whose rejected, revised, and adopted land development plans reveal how they used their power to control, divide, and displace.

This paper explores the governance of mass housing estates through a land-oriented approach, focusing on the mounds' transformation through various regimes. The design concept drew from a 1946 landscape master plan envisioning a linear city along Berlin’s glacial river valley, utilizing war rubble and disposed material to emphasize plateau edges. The covering topsoil of each mound narrates the story of the two neighborhoods from the ground up, considering the medium-term temporality of two transient state systems. By investigating the impact of tenure, funding, and political constraints on development plans, the story illuminates how governing institutions such as state and district planning offices wielded their power to divide and seize control of the land, leading to demolitions and accumulation of matter.

After considering the post-war context of migration and farmland buyouts, the evolution of the mounds from topographical concealment technologies to managed park-like pastorals is shaped by diverse design, labor, and planting practices. This study reads the rapid, bureaucratically layered development in West Berlin alongside the centralized, state-led approach in East Berlin, emphasizing transactions and shared dynamics. Through two detailed case studies, it unpacks the complexities of land governance, offering a different understanding of Berlin's mass housing estates by analyzing landscape as both a medium of power and a site of negotiation.

***

The Waiter’s Wall: The Neo-Constructivist Microhistories in the 1960s Kosova

EDMOND DRENOGLLAVA
University of Cincinnati

Respondent: Federico Marcomini, Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History


“The Waiter” – the so-called mural on the facade of the Hotel “Luboteni”. Source: Spomenik Database postcard archive.

The internal colonial (hi)stories surrounding socialist Yugoslavia, in all of it, in its paradoxes and tenaciousness, are an intense global microhistory. The narratives emerging from Kosovar cities can be included among the neglected narratives, whereas those of avant-garde artists and artworks originating from Kosova are among the undiscussed and unacknowledged accounts—constituting the marginal of the marginal. To map out a more expansive international, and in this case, an “intra-national”¹ constructivist network of individuals, ideas, and coalitions, this study analyzes the neo-constructivist mural called “The Waiter” (1961) displayed on the south-eastern elevation of the 1960s building, Hotel “Luboteni” (Fig.1.). 

This unheeded example reveals the tension between the abstract, idealized art and the often practical, utilitarian architecture that mirrored the broader struggle within Yugoslav society to balance ideological purity with real-life constraints. In Kosova, hence in Yugoslavia as elsewhere in the world, with the economic depression and the rise of propagandistic governments, the painting entered the domain of architecture and flourished. Leger, Duty, and Delaunay in Paris, and Pollock, Gorky, and de Kooning in New York covered ‘architecture’ with their art.² In the case of Hotel “Luboteni,” the mural is conceived as tectonic and allows architecture not just to include the figurative but to become the figurative, dematerializing architecture. 

This only leads the study to raise two important questions about the ontological and cross-pollinative status of art and architecture (of the country) itself: first, how permeable was Kosova’s cultural space in receiving neo-avant-garde tendencies; and second, if and when representation becomes architecture, does the translation from drawing to building have a particular character in neo-avant-garde practice, retaining the qualities of idealism? The research, then, endeavors to illuminate and redefine one among many histories of a micro-zone and that of a micro-community aiming toward the end of history (in inverted Fukuyama terms)—all this microhistory is therefore not diminutive, it is not “micro” at all and is worth knowing for.

¹Referring to activities, issues, or policies that occur within the boundaries of a single nation and its domestic context. Although Yugoslavia was a multi-state federation, many of its policies were implemented intranationally within each republic, allowing for distinct regional dynamics to emerge while still operating under a unified federal framework.

²This was done in and on various pavilions at the 1937 Paris Exposition Internationale and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. On the latter, see Barbara Cohen, Trylon and Perisphere, New York: Abrams 1989.

---

4 March 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

DocTalks x MoMA

The Desagüe Debates: Water and Drainage in Enlightenment Mexico

REBECCA YUSTE
Columbia University

Respondent:  Seth Denizen, Washington University
in St. Louis


Axolotl. Amphibia. Amybystoma. Torner Collection of Sessé and Mociño Biological Illustrations, courtesy of the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, 6331.1253.

This paper examines the role that the desagüe, or drainage system, played in the modification of the environmental conditions of the Valley of Mexico in the late Enlightenment. Begun in the sixteenth century, the desagüe was designed to protect Mexico City from the seasonal floods of Lake Texcoco. Drainage continued for the following two hundred years, using technologies and procedures learned in mining and extraction projects elsewhere in Mexico to uncover useful, productive, arid land. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, the effects of systematically eliminating water from the valley began to emerge. Creole scientists, in particular José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez (1737-1799), became increasingly concerned with the climatic effects of this changing environment. They observed and wrote about the atmosphere, weather patterns, flora and fauna, and the cultural and societal changes suffered by the indios who lived in surrounding villages. These scientists, many of whom worked in opposition to the Bourbon crown, articulated a deep skepticism towards these neo-mercantilist imperial projects, instead proposing a more conservation-minded approach to land and water management. The desagüe, then, becomes an early site to think about the relationship between human activity and climate change. It offers a case study in the longue-dur.e of environmental and ecological history. As the work of these creole scientists demonstrates, an ecological dissent emerged alongside techniques of land control and disruption. Calling into question the need to so drastically change the natural world, these scientists were ultimately silenced, as the imperial reformist projects marched forward in the name of progress, eventually draining the lake completely and forever altering the environmental identity of the valley.

***

Salt and Land

YOSUKE NAKAMOTO
ETH Zürich

Respondent: Esra Sert, MEF University

Influx Tidal Salt Field, Mitajiri, Yamaguchi Prefecture, 1953

This thesis investigates the modernisation of the salt industry in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea region, focusing on the concept of "metabolic rift" derived from Marx's critique of capitalist agriculture. It examines how salt, a vital resource historically embedded in Japan's maritime culture, has shaped the evolving relationship between land and society, from traditional methods of production to contemporary industrial processes. The research traces the historical evolution of salt production, beginning with the premodern tidal influx method, which relied on natural environmental conditions and fostered reciprocal trade between coastal and inland communities. This labor-intensive practice tied salt production deeply to the rhythms of nature and established salt as an economic and cultural link between regions. However, the introduction of mechanised methods, such as the gravity flow and ion-exchange membrane processes in the 20th century, marked a shift towards greater efficiency and standardisation. These technological advancements, driven largely by government monopolisation and the demands of global markets, transformed the salt industry from a locally integrated system into an industrialised, globalised process.

The thesis argues that this shift toward industrial efficiency and reliance on imported salt represents a broader environmental and cultural estrangement, or "metabolic rift," disconnecting local communities from the land and sea. The loss of traditional salt fields signifies not only an economic shift but also the erosion of cultural practices and environmental stewardship linked to Japan’s coastal landscapes. Ultimately, the thesis advocates for a comprehensive reevaluation of Japan's coastal history, which has often been marginalised in favour of prevailing agricultural narratives. By positioning salt as a critical lens for examining the country’s environmental and economic transformations, it emphasises the need to restore Japan's maritime heritage as an essential component of understanding the nation’s cultural landscape.

---

18 February 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

“Forever Hidden”: Architectures of epistemological resistance at the New York World’s Fair 1939/40

MAGDALENA GRÜNER
Universität Hamburg

Respondent: Krista Mileva-Frank, MIT


Deep-sea diorama in the New York Zoological Society pavilion, New York World’s Fair 1939/40, size and materials unknown, Princeton University Library Special Collections, William Beebe Papers, box 12, folder 9.

The pavilion of the New York Zoological Society at the 1939/40 World’s Fair was a veritable twentieth century cabinet of curiosities: electric eel “Electra” sending out Westen Union telegrams, the Bronx Zoo’s famed giant panda “Pandora,” a number of titillating birds and fish labelled as the “crown jewels” as well as habitat groups of different sizes. The highlight of the exhibit, however, was the area dedicated to William Beebe’s deep sea dives on the Bermuda Oceanographic Expeditions, which were the site of the first crewed descents to the ocean-depths, conducted with a diving device called the “bathysphere” in the early 1930ies. This spherical part of the building housed not only the bathysphere itself, but also a series of deep sea dioramas, modeled after pictures painted by expedition artist Else Bostelmann. Within the sphere, a show of light and darkness, of seeing and not-seeing, of science and fiction awaited the audience. While this exhibit can be understood as a model of the bathysphere, the deep sea, and of being present in the deep sea all at once, it also articulates scientific epistemology that embraces non-knowledge, imagination, and fantasy as crucial vehicles of knowledge-making. The aim of my paper is to argue that the bathysphere exhibit is one of the displays on the 1939/40 World’s Fair grounds that undermined the general message of the fair which emphasized a science based on technocratic principles as the key to a prosperous future. Instead, it proposed a science that met its subject of investigation with curiosity rather than rationalist domestication, with awareness of its own limitations rather than claims of absolute authority, with playful engagement rather than entitled mastery.

***

Creating a Social Environment for Coexistence: American Architectural Discourse and
Korean Architects/Urban Planners during the Cold War

MAN JOONG KIM
Binghamton University

Respondent: Sang Pil Lee, Kennesaw State University


Left diagram: Kim Tai Soo, Van Block Housing, Progressive Architecture (January 1969) Right floor plan: Woo Kyu Sung, Roosevelt Island, AIA Journal (July 1975)

Throughout the 1960s, new perceptions of the environment were ignited by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and Martin Luther King Jr.’s advocacy for the Fair Housing Act. The built environment should have shifted its focus toward ecological and spatial justice. Simultaneously, architecture students from Korea, who longed to embrace modernist architecture, encountered challenges from postmodernist claims on their campuses. Faculty and students in U.S. schools were relatively progressive and sought to engage with the discourses demanded by society, while Korean students adjusted themselves to the novel North Atlantic framework through theory and practice. However, the narrative was not exclusively characterized by progressive tendencies. During the Cold War, the United States—as a state, institutions, and schools—actively sought to intervene in domestic urban crises as well as challenges within the Third World with architecture.

This study will examine how architecture students from Korea—specifically Kim Tai Soo, Woo Kyu Sung, and Kang Hong Bin—received education in the United States and how the reinterpreted and recontextualized their experiences from the U.S. in Korea as architects and urban planners. Furthermore, it will explore how architecture and urban planning that embodied publicness became a significant discourse and how this had supported their careers. The participated from the early stages of new interdisciplinary fields such as urban design and architectural theory, fulfilling a role of avant-garde.

---

4 February 2025
8:00 AM EST/ 2:00 PM CET

DocTalks x MoMA

In Front of Everyone’s Eyes:
Cruising Infrastructure in Berlin’s Hasenheide and Whole Festival

CAROLINA SEPÚLVEDA
Harvard University

Respondent: Qiran Shang, University of Pennsylvania


Cruising: Whole Festival at Ferropolis, 2024. Credit: Tomás Eyzaguirre

The research begins with the premise that queer bodies and their collective associations are intricately shaped by their continuous interaction with the urban environment. Similarly, urban life is formed and contested by the diverse collective actions that subjectivities play in the public sphere, serving as indicators for measuring cultural currents. Cities, in this manner, are molded by infrastructures, demonstrating how sets of processes, policies, and practices converge differently in specific places and at particular times.

The proposal delves into the interaction between queer individuals and urban infrastructure within Berlin’s parks. Here, I explore the concepts of “body as infrastructure,” “infrastructured bodies,” and “queer infrastructure” to explain the dynamics between queer bodies, collective affects, and the urban environment. The study focuses on two moments of collective revolt against infrastructure in different time periods. Firstly, I scrutinize the Turnplatz, the first open-air gymnasium inaugurated in 1811 within Hasenheide Volkspark, which faced closure in 1819 following an uprising culminating in the assassination of poet Kotzebue. Secondly, I link Hasenheide's historical Turnplatz to its contemporary role as a cruising site—a practice involving seeking sexual encounters in public areas, typically among men—ultimately connecting it to the genesis of the WHOLE Festival, a three-day queer event situated in Ferropolis, so-called the “city of iron,” featuring cruising areas alongside music stages and darkroom spaces.

The evolution of Hasenheide park from a site emphasizing bodily rigor and discipline in the 19th century to a renowned venue for bodily pleasure through cruising or public sex reflects a broader cultural transformation in contemporary Berlin. Lastly, these cases shed light on the interplay of inclusion and exclusion dynamics arising from the intersection of identity formation, infrastructure, and modern life.


***

Thinking Like a River:
Land, Water & Territorial Imagination in Colonial Punjab (1849-1920)

JAVAIRIA SHAHID
Columbia University

Respondent: Sonali Gowri Dhanpal, Columbia University



Left: The Bar Before Colonization: Caption: “Here the Bar is seen in its natural condition before the introduction of canal irrigation. At this site the jungle growth in the foreground is less than usual. The ragged clumps of trees are characteristic.”

Right: The Bar After Colonization. Caption: “This illustrates what Government waste lands will look like when irrigation is developed in a few years’ time. This illustration speaks volumes.” (Source British Library)


During the pivotal decades spanning India's subjugation to the British crown in 1857 and its eventual partition in 1947, the arid wastelands of Punjab underwent a profound transformation under the sway of colonial governance and economic imperatives. Once inhospitable desert wasteland, these lands were transfigured into fertile fields dedicated to the cultivation of lucrative cash crops (sugarcane, wheat & cotton) and the mobilization of labor.

British engineers and planners, discerning India's hydrological challenge not as one of water scarcity but of its erratic abundance at the wrong time, embarked upon a monumental endeavor to tame the Indus. Their ambition was succinctly articulated by Geoffrey de Montmorency, Governor of the Punjab from 1928 to 1933, who envisioned nothing less than to "make the desert bloom." The solution they proposed: perennial canal irrigation and alluvial planning—a strategic approach to reining in Punjab's tumultuous environment by orchestrating land utilization in harmony with the rhythms of irrigation and water management, negotiated against the caprices of rivers, rainfall, and soil. My dissertation project traces the intricate web of transformations wrought by this endeavor in the Chenab Canal Colony. Here, I examine how the architecture of mandi towns served as the nexus for the convergence of imperial networks spanning the Indian subcontinent, the Atlantic Ocean, and the Indian Ocean world, between the dynamics of extraction between colonial power and the indigenous knowledge and labor. By shifting the focus from notions of improvement to considerations of depletion, this project reconfigures our understanding of water and land and their intrinsic value within the imperial paradigm.

---

21 January 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Architecture school for others:
Howard University; and the inclusive architectural pedagogy (1970-1990)

ALI JAVID
University of Technology Sydney (UTS)

Respondent: Eleonora Antoniadou, Royal College of Art



The design studio’s fundamental question at Howard university:
“What is the most appropriate forms for Others architecture to take?” Image Source: The Hilltop, the student newspaper of Howard University, 1971

Howard University, a leading centre for training African-American students since 1924, has always been a hot-bed for protests against racial discrimination and gender inequality, but after 1968, it also became a base for Third World students protesting against colonialism and cultural-economic hegemony by Western powers in their countries. This atmosphere of the university attracted many Third World students and teachers from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Middle East to participate in its faculty of architecture during the 1970s. Subsequently, by gradually changing the faculty, the curriculum, and even the subjects of the projects, the School of Architecture endeavoured to address Third World countries' needs to shape their future. This presentation examines Howard's inclusive architectural pedagogy in the 1970s, which was implemented under the slogan "Education for All," and investigates its pedagogical response to the participation of students of multiple races and ethnicities from the Third World. Finally, the presentation will chart the impact of its pedagogy upon the subsequent work and approaches of Iranian architectural alumni, Kamran Diba and Khosrow Moradian, during the political crisis and the 1979 Iranian Revolution.

***

Women as Patrons of Architecture in 17th century Mughal Empire:
The Legacy of Nur Jahan

FARHAT AFZAL
DAAP, University of Cincinnati

Respondent: Gül Kale, Carleton University


Jahangir and Prince Khurram entertained by Nur Jahan (detail), India, ca. 1617.
© National Museum of Asian Art.



Islamic architectural history is often visually depicted in ways that contextualizes its significance in the contemporary world. This is illustrated using images showing scenes such as men performing ablutions inside mosque complexes or a group of male students sitting around a teacher in a madrasa. Rather than depicting monuments as empty and isolated, such depictions help to show how people interact with architectural spaces in the Islamic world. This approach is particularly valuable in contextualizing the architecture for people who are not familiar with the Islamic culture. However, many of these images mostly depict men, which often raises the question of “Where are the women?” While scholarship on women in the Islamic world haveincreased in the past several decades, primarily due to the increase in gender studies in western countries, scholars from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds agree that the approach for gender studies developed in the West cannot be thoughtlessly applied to the non-West. In addition, there has been a dearth of scholarship on women and the visual culture of the Islamic world from the pre modern period. Which then raises the next question of, “Where are the women in art and architecture of the Islamic world?” This study thus aims to highlight the contributions of a woman who greatly influenced the artistic traditions of the pre modern Islamic world: Empress Nur Jahan, wife of Emperor Jahangir, the fourth ruler of the Mughal Empire. It will investigate how her architectural patronage in 17th-century India served as both a representation of her power and her position as a spiritual sovereign, a concept that ties political power with sainthood.

---

7 January 2025
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CET

DocTalks x MoMA

The Rural Reinvention:
Emerging Taobao Villages and the Infrastructural Modification of the Invisible China

SOFIA LEONI
Politecnico di Torino


Respondent: Gianni Talamini, City University of Hong Kong


Photo by Sofia Leoni, shot during fieldwork on March 15, 2024. This image captures a local advertisement promoting e-commerce entrepreneurship in rural Junpucun. The phenomenon of rural e-commerce growth, exemplified by Taobao villages, has been strongly encouraged through targeted marketing strategies. Some of the slogans include: Tired of life as a migrant worker? Why not come home and work on Taobao.com?” “You can run a store online and it won’t affect your personal life.” “Visit Taobao if you want to live a better life.”


In recent years, China’s e-commerce revolution has expanded beyond urban centers, integrating remote regions into the country’s economic and political framework. This profound shift addresses the “three rural issues” identified in 2006: declining agricultural productivity, the widening urban-rural divide, and insufficient rural infrastructure and services. By combining national policies with localized implementation, these challenges have catalyzed a unique form of urbanization, often shaped by the interplay of public and private initiatives.

At the forefront of this transformation are Taobao villages, a grassroots revitalization model enabled by Alibaba’s C2C, e-commerce platform. Predominantly located in less developed coastal and central regions, these villages have experienced significant economic and spatial transformations driven by digital commerce. To qualify as a Taobao village, at least 10% of households—or a minimum of 100 shops—must engage in online trade, generating annual revenues exceeding CNY 10 million. This integration of e-commerce has disrupted traditional economic systems while reshaping spatial practices and mobility infrastructures. For instance, streets are frequently appropriated as informal public spaces, adapting organically to the demands of commerce and community life.

This research investigates the infrastructural and socio-economic changes occurring in Taobao villages through a multi-scalar approach that bridges spatial analysis and infrastructural studies, with a particular focus on logistics and the informal dynamics underpinning platform economies. Fieldwork conducted in three case studies—Junpucun in Guangdong Province (specialized in clothing and leather goods), Wuchuchen in Zhejiang Province (focused on tea and bamboo), and Dongfeng in Jiangsu Province (producing furniture and “fake Ikea” products)—uncovers how digital platforms facilitate new forms of entrepreneurship and spatial organization while simultaneously reshaping traditional rural identities.

The findings reveal a dual reinvention of rural labor and space. On one hand, traditional socio-economic structures are adapting to accommodate new entrepreneurial practices tied to global supply chains. On the other, digital infrastructures are reframing the role of logistics, relying heavily on human labor and localized knowledge to sustain platform ecosystems. These dynamics highlight the coexistence of modern and traditional systems, challenging binary perceptions of urban versus rural. At the same time, the study calls for a pluralized understanding of rural areas as spaces of negotiation and hybridity, where old and new forms of infrastructure, labor, and spatial practices intersect. By doing so, it sheds light on how rural China actively participates in global economic processes, redefining itself as a dynamic and adaptive entity in the digital era.

***

China’s Two Tropical Architectures:
Climate, Thermal Technocracy, and Global Socialism in Guangzhou and Dar es Salaam, 1955-76

ZHIJIAN SUN
National University of Singapore

Respondent: Yiping Dong, Xi’an Jiaotong – Liverpool University

Collage showing socialist China's two tropical architectures in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and in Guangzhou, China

This paper offers a critical understanding on the entanglement between environmental history, built environment and geo-politics, by scrutinizing socialist China’s engagements in the built environment of the decolonizing tropical world, which is still marginal to existing narratives on tropical architecture around the (post-)colonial network and global socialism. Based on archival research and fieldwork in China, Tanzania and the UK, it reveals the concurrency and coconstitution between knowledge production and practice of China’s two tropical architectures in the mid-to-late 20th century, i.e. its overseas architectural aid in the decolonizing Tanzania (one of the largest but unnoticed African recipients of China’s aid), and its subtropical modernist architecture in Maoist Guangzhou (a stronghold for China’s subtropical building research), and thus how the Chinese socio-cultural construction of the tropics challenges established discourses on global tropical architecture. Instead of attributing architectural production merely to the genius of certain individuals, it attends to a much broader framework of socialist state-run institutions operating both within and beyond China, in which not only architects and planners, but also meteorologists, physicians, thermal engineers and Party cadres were all active agents for global flows of resources and knowledge. Drawing on theories of techno-political regimes and critical temperature studies, it develops the notion of “thermal regimes” to capture the interdependence between the use of thermal technologies and institutions of socio-political power. Through case studies of Guangzhou Textile Factory (1958) and China-aided Friendship Textile Mill (1968), it scrutinizes how an interlinked set of climatic knowledge, thermal comfort standards, architectural technologies and a body of expertise transcending Cold-War rivalries were marshalled by Chinese and Tanzanian actors, driven by a common appetite for industrial modernity, towards the technocratic control of environmental parameters, state intervention of human bodies, and extensive exploitation of natural resources and human labor.

---

18 November 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET

Ambition and Spectacle:
The Architectural Patronage of Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt

RYAN J. MITCHELL
Temple University

Respondent: Damla Göre, ETH Zurich


Mehmed Ali receiving guests at Shubra Palace in Cairo by Pascal Coste (1787-1879) in Architecture arabe; ou, Monuments du Kaire, mesurés et dessinés, de 1818 à 1826. Image: MIT Dome.




***

Anxiety, Modernity, and Worldmaking: The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Traveling Exhibitions of Brazilian Architecture

CATARINA FLAKSMAN
Harvard University

Respondent: Ciro Miguel, ETH Zurich


Installation photograph of brasilien baut exhibition, Zurich, Switzerland, 1954 (Museu Histórico e Diplomático / ERERIO / MRE / Mapoteca).

20 May 2025
08:30 AM EST / 14:30 PM CEST

DocTalks x MoMA

Field Work: Tina Modotti and the Free Schools of Agriculture, México, 1926-1932

NIKKI MOORE
Wake Forest University

Respondent: Adam Jasper, Chinese University of Hong Kong

Tina Modotti, Pandurang Khankhoje y el aspects del campo de experimentación de la Escuela Libre de Agricultura Emiliano Zapata / Pandurang Khankhoje and the look of the experimental fields of the Emiliano Zapata Free School of Agriculture, 1930. Source: Fototeca Nacional INAH, Pachuca, Mexico.

In 1928, Tina Modotti photographed two men in a dry field holding a bedsheet behind an ascending row of maize plants in Mexico’s Central Valley. On the left stands a student from one of the region’s Indigenous communal farming villages; on the right, India’s ex-pat and México’s first geneticist, Pandurang Khankhoje. One of fifty images recently bequeathed by Dr. Savitri Sawhney to the Fototeca Nacional in Pachuca, México, this little-known work by Modotti, Teozinte (Euchlaena Mexicana), (1928), documents a series of experiments in which decolonial Indigenous agricultural science and art activism were made one. Each newly bequeathed image marks an uncharted moment in Mexico’s scientific, aesthetic, and political postrevolutionary development: namely, the emergence of thirty Free Schools of Agriculture. Supported by Mexican modernists Diego Rivera, Xavier Guerrero and Modotti, and run by First Nation’s teachers, the Free Schools were an educational organization that centered Indigenous land restitution goals via demonstrations of agricultural abundance, self-sufficiency, and what we now call environmental justice.

Too often seen as a passive eye documenting the work of others in the Mexican avant-garde who tokenized ancient First Nations aesthetics, this paper argues that with the addition of Dr. Sawhney’s collection both Modotti and her photography emerge as protagonists championing a complex visual politics of living postrevolutionary Indigenous agency and thriving. As such, Modotti’s work with the Free Schools of Agriculture necessitates a rethinking of the photographer’s oeuvre, as she leveraged her lens, published photos, and circulated prints to reclaim the image of the region’s First Nations from the photographic categories of discrimination they had endured in the press, while celebrating each community’s stake in México’s modern future.

***

A Map of Hong Kong’s Hidden Music Peripheries: Post -1980s

DIEGO CARO
University of Navarra

Respondent: Adam Jasper, Chinese University of Hong Kong


Music studio located in an industrial building, Hong Kong. Source: Diego Caro.


Floor 26 of Ho King Commercial Centre in Yau Ma Tei, the elevator stops. At the end of the corridor, the sound of a heavy metal band, detuned screams buffered by the cracked plywood door of a tiny music studio. Outdated factory buildings in Kwun Tong, industrial architecture gradually surrounded by new commercial and residential complexes; their precarious wait for urban renewal has offered an opportunity for young musicians to establish music studios, classrooms, or improvised bedrooms where music and teenage discoveries mingle with the noise of machinery. Tiny, closed shops with an infinitude of colorful objects that repose after a long day of sales, evoking a sense of initiation into Hong Kong’s underground music scene. The queue is the origin of casual conversations around an orange metallic cube that turns black, green, or purple in the inside, where the combination of sounds and lights acts as a social condenser via the affective power of music.

This research project maps the musical peripheries that coexists with the boisterous rhythm of Hong Kong from within. It encompasses visiting and studying spaces for music, drawing and photographing these often ephemeral venues, analyzing them in reference to the city´s real estate dynamics and sociopolitical context, interviewing the main stakeholders, and reading the stories behind the music to decipher the role of art production in the current context of Hong Kong. By wandering around the spatial networks formed by hundreds of musicians scattered in unexpected secluded venues around the city, this research seeks an alternative understanding of the diverse struggles over placeness in the city through the lenses of emergent culture, showcasing artist’s “tactics” to counter the commodification of creativity in a tightly controlled bureaucratic society.

---

6 May 2025
8:00 AM EST / 2:00 PM CEST

Cruel Opportunities in the Apartheid City:
Meantime Designs and Public Housing in Cape Town

LAURIN BAUMGARDT
Rice University

Respondent: Jessica Ilunga, Keio University


Plans and diagrams of RDP’s predecessor apartheid-era model, also colloquially known as “matchboxes” or as the NE51 series of low-cost houses—“NE” standing for “non-European,” “51” referring to the year of design, followed by a prototype number. Source: Elk, Clifford (Eds.) Metropolis: Architectural Students Congress, University of the Witwatersrand (April 1986).



***

Images of Modern Switzerland.
Aerial Photographs of Walter Mittelholzer

LISA HENICZ
Università della Svizzera Italiana

Respondent: Elif Kaymaz,
Middle East Technical University


Junkers plane above Zürich-Sihlfeld, Walter Mittelholzer, 1925.
ETH Library Zurich, Image Archive / LBS_MH01-004777.

After the First World War, a coinciding of technological improvements within the fields of photography, aviation, and print media facilitated a surge in civil aerial photography. My dissertation studies the impact of aerial photography on urban design and architecture in the first half of the 20th century, with the Swiss aeronaut Walter Mittelholzer as its central figure.

---

PAST TALKS 2024

---

10 January 2024
12pm EST/6pm CET
DocTalks x qswg
Session 3

Queer Ecological Architecture

Luna Lana
Monash University (M.A.D.A) Australia

***

Dissenting Domesticities at Casa Samambaia:
Lota Macedo and Elizabeth Bishop

Marianna Parmanhani
Universidade de São Paulo & Arquitetura Bicha  

***

Graphite Gay Bars:
The Eliciting Potential of Drawing

Rían Kearney 
Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

---

16 January 2023
Lightning Talks

Navigating the what-what:
Southern approaches to South African urban design

Jhono Bennett
The Bartlett UCL

***

Differential impacts of sea level rise
in Lagos’ newly developed region Eko Atlantic City

Sherry Aine Te
Columbia GSAPP

---

23 January 2024
Lightning Talks

Respondent:
Ilkay Tanrisever
Romero Schaefle Partner Architekten, Zurich

Tracing Potential in Water

Blanca Garcia Gardelegui
Independent Researcher and Architect

***

Vulnerable Heritage: the undeniable value of past craftsmanship in Romanian villages and the biodiversity-friendly architecture

Maria Nitulescu
Independent Researcher, Artist and Curator

***

Veil Reveal

Kshitija Mruthyunjaya
Independent Researcher and Architect
Ingrid Halland
Architecture historian and art critic

---

30 January 2024
Lightning Talks

Respondent: Savia Palate, Cyprus University

Designing Wellness:
Epidemics and the Shaping
of Modern Architecture in Iran

Kamyar Salavati
PhD, University of Exeter
 
***

Climatopia:
Evaluating Radical Designs
for the Climate Crisis

Alizé Carrère
PhD, University of Miami

***

Points Noirs

Milena Charbit
Cergy Paris Université / École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles

Deborah Feldman
Laboratoire Architectue Anthropologie LAVUE

Baptiste Potier
Architect

---

8 February 2024

Usus, Fructus, Abusus

Alena Beth Rieger
Oslo School of Architecture and Design

***

The “Frankenstein PC:” Practices of Preserving
and Erasing the Digital in Architecture

Joshua Silver
The University of Manchester,
Manchester Architectural Research Group (MARG)

---

15 February 2024
DocTalks x CCA
Session 1

Representation/Coloniality
Ariel Richards, Lu Zhang, Chenchen Yan

***

Political Economy
Alejandro Saldaña Perales, Duy Mac, Romain David

---

22 February 2024
DocTalks x CCA
Session 2

Housing
Eun-Jeong Kim, Melanie R. Ball, Inês Leonor Nunes
 
***

Environment Making

Sophie Higgerson, Laura Pannekoek, Justine Holzman, Anna Renken

---

29 February 2024
DocTalks x qswg
Session 4 

Parallel Domesticities

Evan Pavka
Toronto Metropolitan University

***

A Canon of Queer Domesticity:
Design Fabulations

Daniel Ovalle Costal
The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

***

Sex Objects and Performing Envelopment: Exploring Queer Spatial Fluidity in Dance Spaces through Nonhuman Mobility and Experimenting Relationalities

Menghang Wu
Ohio State University, USA

---

9 April 2024
DocTalks x MoMA
Session 1

Environmental Design
and the Civilian Conservation Corps,
1933–42

James Fortuna
University of St. Andrews

***

The transformation of a natural
to a built environment for the working class
between the 19th and 20th centuries in Madrid:
«Esto no es fantasear.
Esa Ciudad Lineal, [..]
no es, no, una utopía»

Alice Pozzati
Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America
(Columbia University)

---

25 April 2024

Modern Indian Architecture and the emergence
of a Post-Independence discourse:
The case of Design (1957-1988)

Pappal Suneja 
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
 

---

30 April 2024

Collective Mentality and Architectural Space:
The Narrative of Cannon and Square
in the Development of the ‘Cannon Square’ in Qajar Iran

Mahnam Najafi
Shahid Beheshti University

***

An Aesthetics of Transgression
– The Picturesque in British Bengal around 1780

Leo Herrmann
University of Stuttgart

---

7 May 2024

The Grotesque, the Ugly, and the Bizarre:
Fletcherism and Ornamentation Theory in Non-Western Architecture

Farhat Afzal
University of Cincinnati

***

Early Narratives and Enduring Impacts:
Persian Architecture in the World Architectural Histories

Haleh Hajyasini
University of Arts Tehran

---

14 May 2024

PAN-demonium: Domesticity and Domestication

Laura Mucciolo
La Sapienza University of Rome

***

Housing the Single:
Typological Experimentation, Policies,
and Cultural Models in
Italian Housing Projects and
Domestic Interiors, 1930s-1950s

Michele Rinaldi
Politecnico di Torino + KU Leuven

---

21 May 2024

“Who were the ‘experts’ here anyway?”:
Care, Architecture, and Terminal Illness
in Oxford, 1978-1995

Fiona Kenney
McGill University School of Architecture

***

Malaria Division of Venezuela

Piergianna Mazzocca
Cornell University

---

28 May 2024
DocTalks x MoMA
Session 3

Taming the Desert:
The Great Man-Made River Project
and Libya’s Extractive Colonialities

Shehrazade Mahassini
RCA London

***

Conservation Nationalism

Samarth Vachhrajani 
Yale University

---

4 June 2024
DocTalks x MoMA
Session 4

Rice Weeders' landscapes: female work, songs, and protests
in northern Italy between the 19th and 20th centuries

Chiara Toscani
Architectural Association

***

Long Beach is..?
Articulating Place-Based Scenario Planning
for the Climate Emergency

Kira Clingen
Harvard University Graduate School of Design

---

11 June 2024

The Working Man’s Grand Tour

Sarah Aziz
University of New Mexico and 
The Bartlett School of Architecture

***

Landscapes of Migration.
The ‘men for coal’ agreement, mining settlements, and ecology
among the Italian workers of Limburg, Belgium

Jacopo Zani
ETH Zurich LUS

---

18 June 2024
DocTalks x MoMA
Session 5

Unfolding Spaces: Avant-Garde Environments, Experimental Choreography, and Politics of Space in Milana Broš and Dubravko Detoni's 'La voix du silence' at the 1973 Music Biennale Zagreb

Marjana Krajac
Ohio State University

---

25 June 2024

From the Fascist Cult of Youth to Neoliberal Privatisation.
The Multilayered Identities of the Fara Holiday Camp for Children
in Chiavari (Genoa)

Federico Camerin
Universidad de Valladolid, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

***

The Heritage of Minors, Revisited

Maria Kouvari
ETH Zurich

---

27 June 2024
DocTalks x MoMA
Session 6

Stage 1: The search for shared materials ecologies
to build Arts Collectives in Malaysia

Clarissa Lim Kye Lee
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

---

Miracles in Europe’s Orchard

Damaso Randulfe
Royal College of Art

***

The City and the River:
Origin and Evolution of Lisbon’s Riverfront

João Cruz
Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Urbanas
da Universidade Nova de Lisboa
ISCTE - Instituto Universitário de Lisboa

---

24 September 2024
Lightning Talks

Global Tools
An Inverse Ergonomics Experiment

Eleonora Antoniadou
Royal College of Art

***

The Zad of Notre-Dame-Des-Landes
Between Spatial Situations
And Affective Conditions

Alberta Piselli
La Sapienza University of Rome

---

8 October 2024
DocTalks x MoMA

On the border: A story of river commons

Stefano Tornieri
Luleå University of Technology

***

Yam Economies and Settler Improvement across Whadjuk Noongar Country

Sean Thomas Tyler
Estonian Academy of Arts

---

22 October 2024

Idealizing the Inkas: José
Sabogal to las barriadas

Madeleine Aquilina
University of Michigan

***

Reassembling Landscape Lifecycles

Emilia Hurd, Julia Smachylo
University of Victoria, University of Connecticut

---

12 November 2024

What constitutes virtue in early modern architecture?
On the historical perception of virtuous architecture in France and the Low Countries

Mats Dijkdrent
UCLouvain

***

Nostalgic Moral Panic and Virtue Signalling
in 17th century English Houses

Daniel Sik
UCLouvain

---

2 December 2024

Dynamic Environments: Contemplating Interpretations
of Systems Dynamics, from U.S. to Japan and Beyond

Anna Ulak
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design

***

The Emergence of Photogrammetry in Monument Documentation
and Land Surveying, 1850s-1920s

Shuyi Yin
Columbia University

---

Monday 2 December 2024

Dynamic Environments: Contemplating Interpretations of Systems Dynamics, from U.S. to Japan and Beyond

ANNA ULAK
The Oslo School of Architecture and Design

Respondent: Chelsea Spencer, Rice University





***

The Emergence of Photogrammetry in Monument Documentation and Land Surveying, 1850s-1920s

SHUYI YIN
Columbia University

Respondent: An Tairan, Princeton University

12 November 2024

Respondent: Fabio Gigone
(Danish Academy in Rome / ETH Zurich / University of Copenhagen)

MATS DIJKDRENT
UCLouvain

Virtues are by definition offering a behavioural script to humans. However, in the 15th and 16th century inanimate buildings are also perceived through a moral lens and described in virtuous terms. This apparent contradiction between architecture and moral virtue will be the focus of my paper, identifying motives and strategies of describing a building as virtuous.

The virtue termed ‘magnificentia’ is often mentioned in relation to architecture. According to the Aristotelian definition of the virtue, architectural patronage is magnificent and virtuous as long as the expenditure remains within the bounds of the decorum regarding the owner, occasion and context. However,  this virtue is also often used to describe architecture itself. Frequently, owners seem to inspire authors to describe a building as virtuous. Rhetoricians seem eager to praise the house as a pars pro toto for the great deeds of the patron. Sometimes the building is even presented as an allegory of the patron, and therefore it also takes the properties of the donor.
In other instances, it is the presence of a morally exceptional human living or having visited the building that renders it magnificent and virtuous. In the descriptions of the building the building is framed so that it fits the status of the guest, but afterwards the building keeps those connotations, therefore the guest also gave the building its virtuous status.
However, there are also authors that associate certain building elements with certain virtues. Magnificentia is according to them in marble and in tall towers. In these texts the virtue moves partially from the realm of morality into the realm of aesthetics, creating an intricate web of meaning that retains elements of both.

***

DANIEL SIK
UCLouvain

Print from the Ballad: Mock-Beggers Hall with His Scituation in the Spacious Country, Called, AnyWhere. (London, England: printed for Richard Harper, at the Bible and Harp in Smithfield, 1640)

There has always been a dark side to the display of virtue. Its troubled history in architecture stretches from the plight of greenwashing back to the tower of Babel. Ostentation comes at a cost, even if those costs are offloaded to the least fortunate in society. Such were the argumentations of the nostalgic authors of Early Stuart England, who saw in the increasing magnificence of buildings, a neglect of the hospitable duties traditionally assigned to the land-owning classes.
Such polemics aimed to direct the virtue-seeking eyes away from the symmetry, scale, and decoration of a building, towards an alternative moral semiology. Open gates, smoking chimneys, luminous kitchens, and ‘a butterie door that turneth often on its hinges’ were all highlighted as signalling the virtue of hospitality. Almost ironically, such an argument against ostentation constituted an alternative mode of virtuous display, one which was being stripped of utility as the manorial economy continued to decline in the wake of nascent capitalism.
But what material traces are left of this moral conundrum? This doctalk holds the moral panic against the architectural evidence. Through analysing the signs of hospitality across numerous country houses, this talk aims to identify trends in typological change, and discusses whether such transformations are the cause or effect of moral panic around the decline of Hospitality.

22 October

Respondent: Francisco Gallardo (FRAUD)

Idealizing the Inkas: José
Sabogal to las barriadas

MADELEINE AQUILINA
University of Michigan

***

Reassembling Landscape Lifecycles

EMILIA HURD, JULIA SMACHYLO
University of Victoria, University of Connecticut

---

15 October
Lightning Talks

Respondent: Sebastiaan Loosen, ETH

GABRIEL HERNANDEZ
Universidad Politécnica de Madrid

The remote island of La Gomera is one of the smallest of the Canary Islands, located in the margins of Africa and Europe. Half a century ago, during the 1970s, the island became a testing ground for experimental system approaches in the passage from an agrarian economy into an emerging tourism and services sector. Focused on this shifting context, this contribution explores the visionary aspects of two unrealized proposals that addressed the island's challenges, such as depopulation, lack of economic growth, and rapid desertification. One was developed by Greek architects and urban planners Doxiadis Associates (DA) in 1972, and the other by British practice by Foster Associates (FA) in 1975.
To unpack and compare their complexities, we must examine the design networks that generated them through the lens of environmental history and archival research. Konstantinos Doxiadis, the father of the ekistics theories, represented a highly modern urbanism approach through DA's experience in urban and master planning in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Meanwhile, FA symbolised a techno-optimism approach fueled by their contact with Buckminster Fuller and collaboration with Kenneth Mellamby, one of the UK's first ecologists, who provided research experience in Nigeria and dry climates.
Through their proposals, we can capture different scales of technological application and environmental sensibilities in an insular system with limited resources. DA proposes an infrastructural plan endured on a perimetral ring road. In contrast, FA suggested an ecosystem of small interventions to generate clean energy and water regeneration, merging tourism in banana plantations. Five decades later, in the context of climate collapse, these antagonistic strategies make us rethink the importance of technology's adaptability between the high and low, the global and local.

***

İREM DOĞA AKGÜL, SELIN DOĞANER

Following the devastating earthquake of February 6th in southern Turkey and Syria, more than ten cities were destroyed, became uninhabitable, leading to the loss of cultural and architectural heritage spanning hundreds of years. Countless individuals were killed, leaving many without homes and in vulnerable conditions. Despite initial media coverage, it quickly faded from public attention.
In the SS 23, we, Irem Doğa Akgül and Selin Doğaner, with the help and support of Prof. Markus Bader and Silvia Gioberti, initiated a seminar in UdK Berlin: “The City in Crisis: Phases (Faces) of a Disaster”. It was a direct urge to act proactively as students who were one way or another affected by the Earthquake, aiming to understand the nature of disasters. It became apparent that disasters are disastrous when they hit already disadvantaged areas, as impoverished neighborhoods with minority populations. We understood our research in the scope of disaster management and relief methods, and addressed the challenges the cities face before, during and after disasters, on this specific earthquake, through zooming in and out to neighboring disciplines and examples.
The phases follow: Pre-crisis: Building Construction Industry and Sociopolitical Background: Corruption in the public sector and the state / Construction Politics; Gecekondu (Self-made, squatter’s house) / unplanned urbanization; Earthquake: K.Maraş, Lice, Gediz Earthquakes; Governmental Developments and Happenings in Turkey, Codes and Conducts. Crisis: Earthquake and Emergency Response: Importance of media; Temporary housing solutions in history; Emergency Response, Community Resilience. Community and Recovery: Community participation in reconstruction after disasters; Capitalism and Property Law, Right to Housing; Social capital: Post-Disaster Memoryscapes: Architectural Mediums as Practices of Care; The ongoing plans / reconstruction. Reviving the city (or not): Economics of space production; Loss of Heritage: Theories ofreconstruction; Democracy&Revival: top-down vs. bottom-up?; Excursion: Gibellina Case Study.
Throughout the seminar, we worked with the methodology of collecting, of case studies, readings, personal experiences, and various experts were invited. We produced a newspaper with the participant students, andpresented our work at the Rundgang of UdK. Despite the passing year, only those directly affected by it still  remember it. We aim to revive awareness, and recognise it lives on.

---