Lectures on History & Theory of Architecture, vol. III
March 13–May 15, 2024
EPFL campus – Place Ada Lovelace Bâtiment SG (SG 1212)
Station 15
1015 Lausanne
The Neighbors lecture series is a forum for provocative voices within architectural scholarship. Confronted with unprecedented social and political pressures, those working on the history and theories of architecture are called not just to respond but also to reconsider their historiographic and epistemological tools and perhaps the very purpose of “scholarship”. Organized by the professors of history and theories of architecture at EPFL—Pier Vittorio Aureli, Sarah Nichols, Alfredo Thiermann, and Christophe Van Gerrewey— and their respective laboratories, the series gathers topics that situate architecture within a spectrum of issues from labor to construction, from materials to property, from questions of form to policy and planning, from the organization of class and gender roles to the search for origins in architecture. The series asks how the discipline is instrumentalized by—and instrumentalizes—its broader historical context to operate and affirm its values. Rather than dissolving architecture into a generic multidisciplinarity, the aim is to investigate how architecture is situated next to/with/against its neighbors—whether related disciplines or cultural and political domains—and, in doing so, to challenge and reform the landscape of history and theories of architecture.
March 13, 6–8pm
Pier Vittorio Aureli (EPFL), Architecture and Abstraction: book launch with Sarah Nichols, Christophe van Gerrewey, and Alfredo Thiermann.
March 20, 12:30–2pm
Tatiana Efrussi (L’atelier des artistes en exil), Hannes Meyer’s Kinderheim Mümliswil: From Utopian “Home” to National Memorial.
March 27, 12:30–2pm
Sarah Gainsforth (journalist), Challenging the New Housing Question.
April 10, 12:30–2pm
Claire Zimmerman (University of Toronto), Industrial Architecture, Situated in the Twentieth Century.
April 24, 12:30–2pm
Álvaro Sevilla-Buitrago (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Against the Commons: Elements for a Radical Planning Theory.
May 1, 12:30–2pm
Spyros Papapetros (Princeton University), Pre/Architecture.
May 8, 12:30–2pm
Anna-Maria Meister (Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz: Max Planck Institute, KIT and saai archive Karlsruhe), Fragile Objects, Coded Knowledge.
May 15, 12:30–2pm
Platon Issaias (Architectural Association) Ioanna Theocharopoulou (Columbia University), On the Polykatoikia and its Discontents.
