The FWO-funded Scientific Research Network ‘Texts ≈ Buildings: Dissecting Transpositions in Architectural Knowledge (1880-1980)’ hosts the international conference ‘Architecture and Bureaucracy: Entangled Sites of Knowledge Production and Exchange’, to be held in Brussels on 30-31 October 2019. 

Often experienced by architects as a site of imposition and control, the bureaucracy associated with the production of the built environment can alternatively be seen as one of knowledge exchange. It is and has been a unique forum for the expression and discussion of ideas originating in disparate fields. Principles and concerns particular to architecture, interior design, urban design, engineering, construction sciences and technology, meet and met topical issues in sociology and economy, law and politics, administration, management and government sciences and the ethics of public and private interests. These encounters significantly contribute to the production of architectural thought and to the materialisation of abstract concepts. The conference ‘Architecture and Bureaucracy’ intends to test such premises.

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Preliminary Programme

Day 1 – Wednesday, 30 October 2019

9.00       Welcome & Introduction

9.30       Session 1 – The Politics of Built-Environment Bureaucracy

• Masha Panteleyeva, Cornell University, Architecture Art and Planning Department, ‘Blessing in Disguise: Bureaucracy and Unofficial Architecture’
• Stephanie Herold, Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg, Kompetenzzentrum Denkmalwissenschaften und Denkmaltechnologien, ‘Collective Architectures: Structures and Processes of Architectural Work in the GDR’
• Gabriel Fuentes, Kean University, Micheal Graves College, School of Public Architecture, ‘Between Utopia and Bureaucracy: Architecture and the Politico-Aesthetics of Progress in Revolutionary Cuba’
• Rujana Rebernjak, Arts University Bournemouth, ‘The Object of Bureaucracy: Designing the Spaces of Self-Management under Yugoslav Socialism’

11.30     Coffee break

12.00    Keynote Address 1

• Prof. Ben Kafka, New York University, Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, ‘Made to Wait’

13.00    Lunch break

14.00     Session 2 – Design in Bureaucracy

• Helena Mattsson, KTH School of Architecture, ‘State Phobia and the Reregulation of Architectural Bureaucracy in the 1980s: The Building Code as a Site of Negotiation’
• Maarten Van Den Driessche, Maarten Liefooghe and Pieter-Jan Cierkens, Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, ‘Project Definitions in the Flemish Government Architect’s Open Call Procedure. A Building Principal’s Architectural Discourse, between Empowerment and Compliance’
• Chiara Velicogna, IUAV University of Venice, ‘“Red Tape” at the Tate? The Case of James Stirling’s Clore Gallery’
• Michael Abrahamson, University of Utah, College of Architecture + Planning, ‘Organizational Signature: Norms and Forms in Late Twentieth Century US Architectural Practice’

16.00    Coffee break

16.30    Session 3 – The Media of Bureaucracy

• Elis Mendoza, Princeton University, ‘Building Through Manuals: The Humanitarian Government and its Design Apparatus’
• Jonathan Duval, Brown University, ‘“The Heavenly Light as a Copying Clerk”: The Production of Blueprints and Architectural Authority in the United States before 1917’
• Katie Lloyd Thomas, Newcastle University, ‘“A Devious Route”: Proprietary Specification as a Space on the Page for the Entry of the Building Products Industry into Architecture in the Interwar Period’
• Sarah Hearne, University of California, Los Angeles, ‘The Ends of Originality’

Day 2 – Thursday, 31 October 2019

9.00       Session 4 – Architecture, Governance and Bureaucracy

• Bilge Imamoglu, TED University, ‘The Bureaucratic Tradition and the Professional Ideology: Architectural Culture in the Early Republican Turkey’
• Davide Spina, ETH Zurich, ‘SGI, or the Bureaucratisation of Architecture in Post-War Italy’
• Emine Seda Kayim, University of Michigan, ‘Stasi as a Building Agent: East German Architectural Bureaucracy Between Economy and Security 1961-1989’
• Ruth Lang, Newcastle University, ‘The Sociologist Within: Margaret Willis and the London County Council Architect’s Department.’

11.00    Coffee break

11.30    Keynote Address 2

Dr. Tania Sengupta, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
[Title TBC]

12.30     Lunch break 

13.30     Session 5 – Office Spaces for Bureaucracy

• Dawid Kasprowicz, RWTH Aachen University, ‘From Cockpit to Cubicle – How the Human Factors Engineering Influenced Office Design’
• Eleni Axioti, Architectural Association School of Architecture, ‘An Architecture for the Officialdom: The British Civil Service, Modern Bureaucracy and Whitehall’
• Jens van de Maele, Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning and University of Antwerp, Department of History, ‘Architectural Transparency in the Governmental Bureaucracy: A Case Study on Belgium (1930s)’
• Olga Touloumi, Bard College, ‘The Workshop, or a New Aesthetic for Global Bureaucracies, c. 1945’

15.30     Coffee break

16.00     Session 6 – Bureaucracy, Design and Knowledge Exchange

• Marta Bacuzzi, Politecnico di Torino, Department of Architecture and Design, ‘Gerling Viertel, Köln: the Negotiations behind a Building Complex. Architecture and Bureaucracy in Post-War West Germany’
• Zsuzsanna Böröcz, KU Leuven, Department of Architecture and University of Antwerp, Faculty of Design Sciences, ‘Aligning Views and Knowledge. The Bureaucracy of Belgian Church Restorations with New Stained-Glass Windows after WWII’
• Michael Kahn, University of Technology Sydney, ‘Bureaucracy in the Making—Unpacking Architectural Production from the Inside’
• Yasser Megahed, De Montfort University, Leicester School of Architecture, ‘Dramatising Bureaucracy in Architectural Production: Using an Architectural Graphic Novel to Examine the Competing Ideologies of Multiple Actors in the Contemporary Construction Industry’

18.00    Closing & drinks

Poster presentations (permanent display in the conference venue)

• Laurens Bulckaen, Université Libre de Bruxelles, ‘Postal Offices under the Ministry of the PTT at the End of the 19th Century: Case Study on Louis Cloquet and Stephan Mortier on the Ghent “Hôtel des Postes”’
• Bram De Maeyer, KU Leuven, Department of Architecture, ‘Building a Bureaucratic Environment Abroad: The Case of the Belgian Purpose-built Chancery in Washington D.C. (1945-1957)’
• Nico Deswaef, KU Leuven, Department of Architecture, ‘The Case of Bank Lambert: A Transatlantic Dialogue between Belgian and American Office Building Traditions in Post-war Brussels’
• Martin Dumont, Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, ‘The Unbureaucratic Bureaucrat: Victor Bure and the nascent Administration of Urban Planning (1945-1958)’
• Laurence Heindryckx, Ghent University, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, ‘Iterative strategies of commercial housing development and government policy: The diverse roles of Jean-Florian Collin (Etrimo)
• Zhengfeng Wang, University College Dublin, ‘The Central Market in Hong Kong: Bureaucracy and the Speculative Facility’
• Ivana Mihaela Žimbrek, Central European University, Budapest, ‘The First Yugoslav Department Store in Zagreb: Planning and Building Department Stores under Yugoslav Self-Management, late 1950s-early 1960s’