Purposive Architecture and the Cares of History
The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning is pleased to present public lecture, ‘Purposive Architecture and the Cares of History’ with Claire Zimmerman.
At this historical moment and with increasing urgency, planetary and political crisis demand that humans act with careful intentions. Architectural historians have a particular charge: making sense of the forensic evidence that is left behind in buildings, environments, and their manifold archives in the face of an increasingly ahistorical present. The 2024 Penelope Lecture addresses purpose in the built environment from a decade of research into second-wave industrialisation and its buildings.
My title alludes to the multiple purposes of architecture, not all of them authored by architects, and the related agency of the historian in recording, assessing, and presenting built environments to others. The lecture begins where I began, with the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and a deeply historical work executed at the end of the architect’s life. It spans three recent historical projects that analyse contexts in which such modernism unfolded, contexts that were also deeply embedded in neocolonialism and empire. The first is a recently completed book that addresses the designed environments of US industry during its hyper industrialization of automobility, by architects Albert Kahn, Inc. of Detroit. The second and third are collective efforts: to analyse the technology exchange that spread industrial methods from the US to the USSR (bringing other ones back); and Architecture against Democracy, a book that returns to the political ramifications behind built environments in the modern period.
These three investigations conducted at the intersections of technology and architecture underpin new work on the political economy of built environments, as I articulate some of the crucial tasks confronting architecture and its histories today.
Date and time
Wednesday, August 14, 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Refreshments are available from 5:00pm
Location
State Library of New South Wales, 1 Shakespeare Pl, Sydney NSW 2000
Detroit-Moscow-Detroit
Welcoming a book, remembering Jean-Louis Cohen
Please join us at Tin Sheds Gallery for a discussion between Claire Zimmerman and Andrew Leach on Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization, 1917–1945, an editorial collaboration between Christina Crawford, Claire Zimmermann (current Penelope Professor of Architectural History at the University of Sydney) and Jean-Louis Cohen (Sydney’s inaugural Penelope Professor). Presenting the book, the discussion will also reflect on Cohen’s legacy as a scholar and collaborator—this on the occasion of the anniversary of his untimely death.
Date and time
Thursday, August 8, 6:00pm – 7:00pm
Location
Tin Sheds Gallery, 148 City Road, Darlington NSW 2008
History for Architecture
Introducing the Penelope Visiting Professorship in Architectural History
How does the stuff of history figure in architectural design? How are buildings quoted, sampled, translated, or invoked by new work? Exploring a series of cases, a panel discussion will work through this question to launch a new, two-year program to explore history’s place in architectural culture.
Introduced by Dean Robyn Dowling and Andrew Leach; with a recorded message of welcome from inaugural Penelope Professor Jean-Louis Cohen; and with live and in-person interventions and panel discussion by Laura Harding, Peyvand Firouzeh, Michael Mossman and Antony Moulis.
Date and time
Thursday 3rd Mar 2022, 6:00 pm – 9:00 pm AEDT
Location
Lecture Theatre 1, School of Architecture, Design, and Planning, University of Sydney
148 City Rd, Darlington NSW 2008, Australia
New World: Harry Seidler, Brazil and the Australian City
Professor Philip Goad (University of Melbourne) will discuss the impact on Harry Seidler’s architecture of his six-week visit to Brazil journey in 1948, en-route to Australia from the United States, in which he worked briefly for Oscar Niemeyer and visited numerous examples of Brazilian modernism.
Date and time
Thursday 19th May 2022, 7:00 pm – 8:15 pm AEST
Location
Recital Hall East, Sydney Conservatorium of Music
1 Conservatorium Rd, Sydney NSW 2000, Australia
Jean-Louis Cohen on Frottage City
The Inaugural Penelope Lecture
Please join the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning for this special public lecture presented live and in-person by Jean-Louis Cohen, Sheldon H. Solow Professor of History of Architecture at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts. An authority on the history of modern architecture, his exhibitions have been staged at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou and MAXXI. He is the inaugural Penelope Visiting Professor in Architectural History at the University of Sydney.
Cities have never ceased observing each other, as patterns and structures have been displaced across borders and oceans since ancient times. Most cities contain fragments borrowed from others: Roman layouts have shaped Versailles and St. Petersburg, while “little Parises” have proliferated in Latin America or the Balkans, and scores of Venices everywhere. Rather than tracking dubious “influences,” the history of these borrowings and translations can be considered on the base of concepts developed in literary theory, such as intertextuality, and with the help of geometric principles. Whereas Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter famously used the notion of collage, derived from Cubism, that of frottage, introduced by Surrealist artist Max Ernst, could help understand the migration and the assembly of urban forms from city to city.
Date and time
Tuesday 20th September 2022
5:30pm – Drinks and canapes
6pm – lecture and discussion
Location
The Utzon Room, Sydney Opera House
The lecture will be streamed here. For tickets to the live event or to join the waitlist…
A Sydney Masterclass: On Gehry, In Gehry
Following his lecture, Prof. Cohen will on Wednesday 21 September offer an in-person masterclass for graduate students, doctoral candidates, early career academics and others interested in the work of architectural history. Prof. Cohen has commenced writing a major nine-volume catalogue raisonné of the drawings of Frank O. Gehry—the first of which, attending to the architect’s formation and early career, now having been published. How to approach a life-and-works project in the present moment? How to predicate the changed conditions of architectural design and production embraced by Gehry over the course of decades? To locate this figure in history? This masterclass will be held in Gehry’s only Sydney project: the Dr Chau Chak Wing Building of the University of Technology Sydney and co-hosted by UTS and the University of Sydney with the support of the Penelope Visiting Professorship in Architectural History.
Date and time
Wednesday 21 September 2022, 10am – 12pm; meet and greet at Café 80 from 9.30am
Location
Room CB08.03.002, Dr Chau Chak Wing Building (8), UTS, 14–28 Ultimo Road, Ultimo
Expressions of interest to architecture@sydney.edu.au
Please note, space is limited in each masterclass. Please send expressions of interest (name, affiliation, current work/preoccupations) to the addresses noted above. If we need to limit participation, we will prioritise students and early career academics over established scholars.
A Brisbane Masterclass: Architecture and the City
On Thursday 22 September, Prof. Cohen offers a second masterclass at The University of Queensland (UQ), exploring the themes of his Penelope Lecture, Frottage City, and the role of architecture in mediating and advancing relationships between cities. This extends his important books and exhibitions on Soviet Americanism, the post-war reception of Italian architecture, the wartime practices of architects, and the imagination of the future. How might we address a history of architecture conceived in the way that architects think, practice and communicate? What tensions might this introduce? And what novel insights? This masterclass be held in UQ Architecture’s City Campus. It is co-hosted by UQ and the University of Sydney with the support of the Penelope Visiting Professorship in Architectural History.
Date and time
Thursday September 2022, 3.45pm for a 4pm start
Location
380 Queen Street, Brisbane
Expressions of interest to architecture@uq.edu.au
Please note, space is limited in each masterclass. Please send expressions of interest (name, affiliation, current work/preoccupations) to the addresses noted above. If we need to limit participation, we will prioritise students and early career academics over established scholars.