Architecture and Real Estate: Historical Perspectives

10-11 June 2022
Zürich
Switzerland and Online

Today, we still think of urban transformation as a process led by planners and architects. And while it is undeniable that these two professions have made a major contribution to the global process of urbanisation in the modern era, it is difficult to claim that our cities are the results of their efforts alone. Many other actors have been (and still are) involved in their continuous making and re- making. Arguably the most significant of these actors are real estate developers. Think of Georgian London, post-war Rome, or contemporary Delhi: all cities whose extraordinary growth was not led by grand plans or architectural visions, but by the logic of the real estate development and construction industries.

The relative unimportance of authorship in the general economy of real estate development partially explains the lack of literature devoted to the latter in our discipline. Instead, it is imperative that we, as architectural historians, start considering real estate development as a key site for architectural and urban production. The conference Architecture and Real Estate: Historical Perspectives proposes to discuss the processes and products of real estate development by foregrounding them as objects of architectural and urban history.

The event is jointly organised and supported by the Chair Maarten Delbeke and the Chair Laurent Stalder at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta), ETH Zurich, and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

To consult the programme and register, please visit the conference website.

Share this post

News from the field

New Voices in Expo Research

ISIE's 2024 Online Emerging Scholars Symposium 22 March 2024 ISIE invites abstracts for its 2024 online symposium New Voices in Expo Research Submission deadline: 19 December 2023 The 2024 symposium will bring emerging scholars and established experts together to...

Women designing and planning for social equality

ZHAW Institut Urban Landscape - Tössfeldstrasse 11, Winterthur Keynote Lecture: Dr. Iulia Stătică (University of Sheffield, UK) Descriptive accounts of the lack of evidence of women's participation and its material implications are no longer major trends in gender...

Writing Land into Architectural Histories

Overview This will be an in-person symposium. The Spring 2024 Symposium “Writing Land into Architectural Histories” organized by the doctoral students in Cornell University’s History of Architecture and Urbanism Society (HAUS), aims to explore the entangled histories...

rita_ 21

rita_ journal has opened The Call For Papers for its 21th issue 01 / 11 / 2023 - 11 / 01 / 2024 rita_ is an indexed journal of academic texts that publishes articles, essays and critical reviews, related to the project, theory and practice of architecture from its...