Mapping Architectural Criticism Third International Symposium
Organized by Rennes 2 University, with Les Archives de la Critique d'art, Rennes and Académie d'Architecture, Paris
This international symposium is part of the ANR research project Mapping Architectural Criticism (http://mac.hypotheses.org), which aims to develop a field of research on the history of architectural criticism, from the last decades of the 19th century to the present day. The symposium intends to debate two key questions related to the geographies of criticism: what are criticism's disciplinary boundaries and which territories has criticism shared from the last decades of the 19th to the end of the 20th century with other disciplines. In the first place, the symposium interrogates the overlapping of architectural criticism with different kinds of architectural writing, in particular those pertaining to architectural history and theory, but also those stemming from other disciplines.
The symposium is equally aimed at highlighting the relationships, the common terrains, and the conceptual tools that architectural criticism has in common with other genres of criticism, such as art criticism and literary criticism.
The term "territory" is used here to refer primarily to the various disciplinary fields on which criticism relies and from which it borrows its concepts and patterns of interpretation, as well as its intellectual tools. The term "boundary", for its part, is used to denote the zones of exchange and confrontation between criticism, history, theory and other types of writing on architecture, as well as between architectural criticism and other forms of criticism. The main aim of the symposium is to map these territories and delineate these boundaries.
Monday, April 3, 2017: Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, salle Vasari
09:30 Registration and Welcome Address
09:45 Introduction
Session 1. Intellectual Territories: Borrowing Tools and Rhetorics from Other Disciplines Chair: Paolo Scrivano, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University
10:15 Stefania Kenley Independant Scholar, Paris: Blind spot in the visual field of art-architecture criticism
10:45 Valeria Lattante AUIC, Politecnico di Milano: The concept of tradition from T. S. Eliot literary critic to E. N. Rogers architectural theory
11:30 Raúl Martínez Department of History and Theory of Architecture, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech.: Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism at the Inception of Bruno Zevi’s Theoretical Corpus
12:00 Jasna Galjer Department of Art History, University of Zagreb: Cultural exchange as Architecture’s expanded field
12:30 Adrian Anagnost Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University, New Orleans: Critique and Complicity: The Art Critical Lineage of Projective Architecture
13:00 Lunch Break
Session 2. Political and Geographical Boundaries
Chair: Giovanni Leoni, Università di Bologna14:30 Jianfei Zhu University of Melbourne: Searching for a Sensitive Criticism on Architecture of Contemporary China: The Case of He Jingtang
15:00 Charlotte Ashby Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London: The Archaeology of Finnish Architectural Criticism
15:30 Christina Pech Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm: Criticism on Display. The Swedish Museum of Architecture and the Production of History in the mid-1970s
16:00 Discussion and Pause
17:00 Key-note Lecture: Marco Biraghi, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, What does it mean architecture?
Tuesday, April 4, 2017: Académie d’Architecture, Paris
09:30 Manuelle Gautrand (Présidente de l’Académie d’Architecture, tbc): Welcome Address
Session 3. Judging Architecture: Professional, Popular or Academic Criticism?
Chair: Réjean Legault, Université du Québec à Montréal09:45 Christina Contandriopoulos Department of Art History, Université du Québec à Montréal: Against the wall: the birth of architectural criticism in early 19th Century Paris
10:15 Michela Rosso Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino: Architectural Criticism and Cultural Satire in the 1980s: shared territories and languages
10:45 Break
11:00 Kristen Gagnon Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, Ottawa: Popular Architecture Criticism: A definition, a delineation and a débâcle
11:30 Detlef Jessen-Klingenberg independent Scholar, Germany: Architectural criticism as cultural criticism (“Kulturkritik”) and professional criticism (“Fachkritik”). A case study on the example of Werner Hegemann
12:00 Discussion
12:45 Lunch Break
Session 4. Professionalism: the Critic as a Specialist
Chair: Anne Hultzsch, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL London and Oslo School of Architecture and Design
14:15 Laurens Bulckaen and Rika Devos, BATir Department, École polytechnique de Bruxelles: Louis Cloquet (1849-1920): architectural writings of a critical engineer
14:45 Irene Lund Faculty of Architecture, Université Libre de Bruxelles – Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: The multiple origins of modernist architecture criticism in the Belgian avant-garde magazine 7Arts (1922-1927)
15:15 Patrizia Bonifazio Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano: “Zodiac” (1957-1973). Art and technique to define architecture in front of the mass production
15:45 Lorenzo Ciccarelli Department of Architecture, University of Florence: Giovanni Klaus Koenig (1924-1989): Architectural Criticism between Semiology, Industrial Design and Rail Trains
16:30 Final Discussion / Roundtable / Table ronde