Darwin’s Pictures | Icons of Evolution in the 19th Century

Charles Darwin had a lifelong interest in pictorial representations of natural history. He sketched out his evolutionary theory and related ideas over a period lasting more than forty years. The lecture offers a tour through Darwin's picture archives and shows that each of his images characterizes a different aspect of his relationship with visual information. The lecture argues that he was thinking with the eyes and that his pictorial representations and the popularization of the theory of evolution were vitally interconnected.

Julia Voss, born 1974 in Frankfurt, Germany, works as an editor of the arts department at FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung). In 2009 she was awarded the Sigmund-Freud-Preis für wissenschaftliche Prosa by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.

Key publications: Darwin's Pictures. Views of Evolutionary Theory, 1837-1874, Yale University Press, New Haven 2010 (deutsch: Darwins Bilder. Ansichten der Evolutionstheorie, 1837-1874, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007); Darwins Jim Knopf, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2009; Charles Darwin. Das Lesebuch, Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2008; Charles Darwin zur Einführung, Junius Verlag, Hamburg 2008.

Architecture Lecture Series 2011/12 | Architecture History after Foucault

This year's lecture series will be covering selected topics and events of architecture history. However its main focus is on methodological approaches of historical research or design methods that are directly or indirectly based on historical investigation and knowledge.
The background to this years lecture series is twofold: On the one hand in Europe architecture schools are increasingly under pressure to combine design with research and produce a higher output of dissertations. Hence, in architecture we simply need to have more knowledge on scientific methods and practices. On the other hand Big!Bad?Modern: the institute's year theme of last year led to questions about the present historical standpoint. (Angelika Schnell)

Lecturers winter term:
Georges Teyssot | 31.10.2011
Martin Beck | 28.11.2011
Hermann Czech | 12.12.2011
Eva Blimlinger | 09.01.2012

Lecturers summer term:
Sokratis Georgiadis | 19.03.2012
Christian Kravagna | 26.03.2012
Alessandra Ponte | 30.04.2012
Philipp Sarasin | 14.05.2012
Julia Voss | 04.06.2012

Previous lectures :

31.10.2011
Georges Teyssot , Quebec
Nomadic Lines: from Hogarth to the Spline
As Deleuze and Guattari wrote, to have something stand up doesn't mean having a top and a bottom. One can draw a monument, but one that may be contained in a few marks or a few lines. The lecture attempts a brief history of the line, from William Hogarth's "line of beauty"; John C. Loudon's "ugly line"; Henry van de Velde's line as a force; František Kupka's curved ribbons; Wilhelm Worringer's abstract, northern line; Wassily Kandinsky's errant lines; Paul Klee's inflected lines; up to the topology of splines used in 2D/3D modeling. Today, a question remains: how topological concepts have been introduced in architecture? Perhaps a particularly fine topology is needed to describe the formation of spirals and vortices, or nomadic, smooth spaces, which are formed by sets of haptic relations. As Deleuze and Guattari evoke, hacceities are to be found along intersecting lines: "Climate, wind, season, hour … Haecceity, fog, glare. A haecceity has neither beginning, origin nor destination; it is always in the middle. It is not made of points, only lines. It is a rhizome."

The nomadic line is defined by the becoming-line of the point, which unfolds in a trajectory. As an outcome, nomadic lines take on great vortical organizations, prop up smooth topological spaces, and allow for a speed of proliferation that expands beyond the frame. The aim of art is to divert force into matter. What sets apart the nomadic line, whether from the northern-gothic variety or from the baroque type, is that it embodies speed and fluidity, while it captures intense forces in new materials.

Georges Teyssot has taught history and theory at Princeton University's School of Architecture, where he was Director of the Ph.D. program, and at the ETH of Zurich. Presently, he is Professor at Laval University's School of Architecture in Québec (QC, CA). He has published many volumes, including: Die Krankheit des Domizils. Wohnen und Wohnbau, 1800-1930, (Wiesbaden, 1989). He has directed a collective volume, with Monique Mosser, entitled The Architecture of Western Gardens (periodically republished in five countries, 1991 to 2002). He has written the introduction to the volume of Diller + Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes (New York, 1995; reprint, 2011). He was the curator of an exhibition on The American Lawn. Surface of Everyday Life, at the CCA (Montréal, 1998), and the editor of a volume on The American Lawn (New York, 1999). More recently, the University of Coimbra has published an anthology of his work translated in Portuguese (Lisbon, 2010); and a selection of his most recent essays will appear in the Writing Architecture series at The MIT Press (forthcoming, 2012).

28.11.2011
Martin Beck , Vienna / New York
Rumour Has It

1. In making a structural cartop panel a great deal of care has to be given to accuracy, particularly to getting the crotches between the flanges the correct distances apart, these points become the tips of the structural panel and thus determine the edges. The holes are also important; the end holes should be as close to the corners as possible. Bring them back just far enough so the connecting bolts can be fitted through. They should also be as close to the fold as possible. The farther down they are on the flange the more flexing the seam can do.

2. The love density effect is interesting because it is counterintuitive. We very well might have guessed that the amount of love in a commune would be directly associated with stability; instead we find that there is an inverse association… The extensive literature on cohesiveness would lead us to believe that the proposition, love density equals group stability, is well established. In fact, there is no evidence for this except in the very special circumstance of men in combat situations.

3.
1 small winter squash (1 1/2 pounds)
2 onions, chopped
1 cup rolled oats or rolled wheat
1/2 cup raisins or currents
1/2 cup mixed dried fruit (dates, prunes, apricots, apples, figs, etc.) snipped
1/2 cup sunflower or pumpkin seeds
1/2 cup water
1/4 cup oil
1/4 cup sesame seeds
1/4 cup whole wheat flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon each cinnamon and cloves

Biography

Martin Beck is an artist whose exhibitions and projects engage questions of historicity and authorship and they draw from the fields of architecture, design, and popular culture. His works often engage histories of exhibiting and communication formats and, on a material level, negotiate display's function as a condition of image-making. Recent exhibitions include "Remodel" at Ludlow 38 in New York and "Communitas" at Camera Austria, Graz, (2011), contributions to the 29th São Paulo and the 4th Bucharest Biennales (2010), and "Panel 2-'Nothing better than a touch of ecology and catastrophe to unite the social classes....'" at Gasworks in London (2008). Beck is the author of an Exhibit viewed played populated (2005), About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe (2007), and the forthcoming The Aspen Complex (2012).

12.12.2011
Hermann Czech , Architect, Roland Rainer Chair 2011/12, Vienna
Things that look like nothing

"Architecture is not life. Architecture is background. Everything else is not architecture."

This text of 1971 is one aspect of my work. Another is "Umbau", a German word which is only insufficiently translated by the terms transformation, remodeling, adaptation, conversion etc. It is a central notion of architectural theory. Everything is conversion.

Architecture is dealing with very many objects; objectivity means treating each of them in accordance with its necessities. Since very few of these objects are alike, the true basis and result of "Sachlichkeit" is heterogeneity, not similarity. Architecture is part of everyday life and vice versa; so it cannot help but include the trivial.

Loss of comfort is the most annoying side effect that goes with change. When we architects tend to reinvent the wheel in every generation, we should see that it does not first come out square each time.

Those are central aspects: architecture as background, Umbau, heterogeneity including triviality, and comfort.

Hermann Czech, born in Vienna, studied with Konrad Wachsmann at the Summer Academy Salzburg and with Ernst A. Plischke at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His heterogeneous work includes planning, e.g. a critical subway network project for Vienna (with several authors, 1967), as well as interventions of small scale, like "Kleines Café" (Vienna 1970 and 1974), or the "Wine house PUNKT" (Caldaro, Italy 2005), and exhibition design, as "Wien 1938", in the Vienna town hall 1988.

19.03.2012
Sokratis Georgiadis , Stuttgart
non-standard antik

26.03.2012
Christian Kravagna, Vienna
Adolf Loos and the Colonial Imaginary

This paper reads Adolf Loos in a postcolonial perspective. In his building practice, Viennese architect Adolf Loos, a co-founder of modern architecture, had no direct relation to colonialism. Nevertheless, in his numerous writings Loos proclaimed a concept of modernity that was committed to colonial imaginations and conceptions. The lecture concerns itself with some of the recurring motives in Loos' writings on modern (everyday) culture and examines their significance in a non-colonial Austrian context. Loos will be considered as paradigmatic for the distinct shape that colonial worldviews and colonial rhetoric took on in European countries not directly engaged in the colonial project. Of special interest in the case of Loos is his aim of a cultural self-proselytization of Austria that is based on the contraposition of civilization and the primitive well established in other discourses on modernization but adjusted to regional/national particularities which differ from the typical colonial constellation.

Christian Kravagna is an art historian, critic and curator. He is Professor of Postcolonial Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. He is the editor of the books Privileg Blick. Kritik der visuellen Kultur, Berlin 1997; Agenda. Perspektiven kritischer Kunst, Vienna/Bozen 2000; The Museum as Arena: Artists on Institutional Critique, Cologne 2001 and Routes: Imaging travel and migration, Frankfurt 2007. Kravagna has curated exhibitions like Living Across: Spaces of Migration, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2010; Planetary Consciousness, Kunstraum der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, 2008; Migration: Globalisation of Cultural Space and Time, Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi, 2003 (with Amit Mukhopadhyay) and Routes: Imaging travel and migration, Grazer Kunstverein 2002. Since 2005 he is curator (with Hedwig Saxenhuber) at Kunstraum Lakeside in Klagenfurt, a center for contemporary art and theory.

30.04.2012
Alessandra Ponte, Montréal
A Home Is Not a House (Revisited)

In the 1965 issue of Art in America, presenting the first version of Reyner Banham and François Dallegret "A Home Is Not a House", a paragraph clearly acknowledged the double authorship of the illustrated essay. Despite such empathically stated double authorship, little attention has been devoted to Dallegret's contribution that most iconically realizes the environmental tendencies present in American domestic architecture.

Dallegret's vast photographic archive, still housed in his home in Montreal, witnesses the essential role of photography in the development of his oeuvre: photographs as traces of works in progress or finished products, snapshots as memories of encounters and events, and images as the basis for photomontages. Many of them were taken in a studio by professional photographers who specialised in portraying works of art. Two such photographers were Shunk and Kender, the same photographers hired by Yves Klein in October 1960 for his Saut dans le Vide. Like Klein, captured while jumping into space from an elevated garden wall, François Dallegret performs in front of the camera. The resulting images become an essential component of the work, as the photographs of his naked body montaged into the "environmental bubble".

Alessandra Ponte is full professor at the École d'architecture, Université de Montréal. She has taught history and theory of architecture and landscape at Pratt Institute (New York), Princeton University, Cornell University, Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, and ETH (Zurich). She has written articles and essays in numerous international publications, published a volume on Richard Payne Knight and the Eighteenth century Picturesque (Paris, 2000) and co-edited, with Antoine Picon, a collection of papers on architecture and the sciences (New York 2003). For the last four year she is been responsible for the conception and organization of the Phyllis Lambert Seminar, a series colloquia on contemporary architectural topics. She organized the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965-1975 (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, 2009) and recently collaborated to the exhibition and co-edited the catalogue of God &Co: François Dallegret Beyond the Bubble (London: Architectural Association, 2011). She is currently completing a series of investigations on North American landscapes for her forthcoming book Maps and Territories (London, 2012).

14.05.2012
Philipp Sarasin
Michel Foucault's 'Antihumanism'

The seminal work of Michel Foucault is arguably centered on his throughout critic of what was called "humanism" in the 1950s and 1960s. His famous claim that "Man will disappear like a face in the sand on the beach" (1966) made him a target of fierce leftist critiques. The lecture will sketch the political and philosophical dimensions of Foucault's "antihumanism", and it will argue that critical thinking of today might still profit at least in some aspect from this old concept and these old battles.

Born 1956 in Basel, Switzerland; Professor for Modern History at the History Department, research unit for social and economic history, University of Zurich. Fields and topics of research: History of knowledge, theory of historiography, urban history, cold war history, history of the body and history of sexuality.

Key publications: Darwin und Foucault. Genealogie und Geschichte im Zeitalter der Biologie, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2009; (ed. with S. Berger et. al.).: Bakteriologie und Moderne. Studien zur Biopolitik des Unsichtbaren, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2007; Anthrax. Bioterror as fact and fantasy, Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press 2006 (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 2004); Michel Foucault zur Einführung, Junius Verlag, Hamburg, 2005, 4th edition 2010; Geschichts¬wissen¬schaft und Diskursanalyse, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2003; Reizbare Maschinen. Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765-1914, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 2001; (ed. with J. Tanner): Physiologie und industrielle Gesellschaft. Studien zur Verwissenschaftlichung des Körpers im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp 1998; Stadt der Bürger. Bürgerliche Macht und städtische Gesellschaft, Basel 1846-1914 (2nd edition), Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1997 (Paris: L'Harmattan 1998).