PAST TALKS 2025
2 December 2025
10:00 AM EST / 4:00 PM CET
Porta-Kitchen:
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.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 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:
RYAN J. MITCHELL
Temple University
Respondent: Damla Göre, ETH Zurich
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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.
***
CATARINA FLAKSMAN
Harvard University
Respondent: Ciro Miguel, ETH Zurich
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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.
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
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.
***
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.