A symposium supported by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the Architecture Space and Society Centre.

This one-day symposium explores new research on factory architecture and images of factories between the Industrial Revolution and the present day, and across several different countries. Housing changing technologies, and acutely related to the unfolding of social and work relations central to industrial capitalism, this building type is critically important for understanding how modernization has taken place over two and a half centuries. Its legacy remains with us today, in contemporary industrial installations as well as the ongoing production of heritage narratives focused on buildings and places.

Factories offer distinctive ways to understand architecture as a globally interconnected phenomenon, intimately tied to urban change, visions of modernity and technological utopia. The event will offer speakers and audiences the opportunity to share ideas around questions of political economy in architecture.

Speakers:

  •  Tilo Amhoff, University of Brighton
  • Peter Christensen, University of Rochester
  • Mark Crinson, Birkbeck
  • Anke Hagemann, Technical University Berlin
  • Katie Lloyd Thomas, Newcastle University
  • Claire Zimmerman, University of Michigan

Organized by Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman.