In the decades following the Second World War, coal developed from an extracted energy source to a multi- dimensional modernist project. Across Europe, as nations rebuilt after the conflict, coal mining became the epicentre of technological optimism, democratic politics, urban regeneration, and mass communication as its architecture and spaces were redefined as symbols and sites of progress, welfare state ambition, and conduits for the reorganisation of everyday life. It is now undeniable that coal has been and is environmentally adverse. As both a literal and symbolic driver of the climate crisis it embodies the contradictions of industrial modernity. Coal catalysed a super-wicked problem – vast in scale, entangled in governance, and resistant to solutions.
But the coal industry offers a crucial historical lens on long-term planning, public investment, technological storytelling and the aesthetic strategies of extractive ambition. For example, new forms of housing, settlement, welfare amenities and health infrastructure, as well as information and social networks, grew alongside the modernised extractive industry, producing distinctive new architectural typologies, urban cultures and landscapes.
This conference invites papers that revisit coal, for better and worse, as a formative force in twentieth-century architectural, institutional and media practices. We are interested in how coal mediated relations between geology, governance, labour, technology, and spatial representation. What can post-war coalscapes teach us about infrastructure as ideology? What spatial tools were used to care for, manage, or mythologise extraction and energy and the workers who exercised them? What lessons – spatial, cultural and social – can be learned from the extraction of coal in twentieth century Europe?
We welcome interdisciplinary contributions that explore (but are not limited to) the following thematic territories:
Architecture of coal modernisation
Visual culture, media, and propaganda
Modernisation and infrastructure
Institutional care for labour (baths, hospitals, schools, clubs, libraries, social networks)
Housing and settlement
Transitions and afterlives of extractive landscapes
Although labour and extraction of coal are often hidden in plain sight, by examining how coal mediates its layered identities – as an energy source, social structure, and epistemic regime – the conference aims to open new perspectives on how extractive modernity shaped ways of thinking that outlived the pits and remain instrumental to how we continue to consider the environment today. This will be an in-person conference held at the Irish Architectural Archive [45 Merrion Square E, Dublin], on the 5th + 6th November 2026. See application details on next page.
Keynote speaker: Łukasz Galusek (Director, Silesian Museum, Katowice)
Guest expert panellists include: Tom Avermaete, Stefan Berger, Carola Hein, Imre Szeman (others to be confirmed)
The DARK MATTER / ACME Conference Team
Professor Gary A. Boyd, Dr Tabassum Ahmed, Dr Emma Campbell, Dr Rebecca Jane McConnell, Anna Cooke, Niall Patrick Walsh, Dr Jack Kavanagh
Any queries should be sent to: jack.kavanagh@ucd.ie
Application
This will include 300 word abstract and 150 word biography
Timeline
Application deadline: 31st March 2026
Notification of acceptance: 30th April 2026
Conference dates: 5+6th November 2026
Selected contributors will be invited to publish their conference paper through an edited volume in 2027
DARK MATTER: Revisiting the Architecture of Coal in Post-War Europe is an in-person conference hosted by the ACME (Architecture of Coal in Modern Europe) project (ERC Advanced Grant, 2024–2030), taking place at the Irish Architectural Archive, Dublin on 5+6 November 2026.