Photograph by Katharina Ya
Reflections by Panagiotis Farantatos and Kasper Lægring
Aarhus in June proved to be a particularly hospitable place for a conference. The weather was exceptionally good, but the compactness of the city meant that participants had little reason to stray far from Aarhus University. For five days, around 340 architectural historians, architects, and scholars from across countries, cultures, and intellectual traditions remained remarkably concentrated around Aarhus University, moving between presentations, conversations, book launches, meetings, walks, receptions, and dinners. The result was a dense programme that nevertheless left room for the encounters that make a biennial conference more than a sequence of papers.
The scale of this gathering was already apparent before the conference began. Receiving a surprising 150 proposals for sessions and roundtables for EAHN 2026 – the ninth edition of the biennial conference format – confirmed the increasing appeal of the EAHN as a forum for the exchange of ideas and new research. It also allowed us to build the thematic and chronological diversity we had been striving for, while organizing the programme into thematic tracks that went beyond simply grouping the panels retrospectively. The next phase brought another surprise: the call for individual papers resulted in no less than 775 submissions.
The resulting 30 sessions and roundtables organized this breadth across subjects, periods and geographies, while thematic questions proved particularly effective in cutting across conventional chronological divisions: panels exploring architecture in relation to the underground, air, water, animals, thresholds, ageing, disability, and a wide range of materials brought together scholars working across remarkably different historical periods. The keynotes offered a complementary way of framing this diversity. Landscape and welfare, post-colonial perspectives and historical methods, artificial intelligence and imitation each addressed currently pressing questions, while demonstrating how far the field has expanded beyond its more familiar boundaries.
At the same time, the conference brought together familiar faces and many early-career scholars. The presence of numerous PhD students and student assistants gave the event a particular vibrancy and helped sustain the sense of an EAHN community that is both established by now and continually renewing itself.
Working within an established format such as the biennial conference series comes with the advantage that many solutions have been tried and tested by previous organizing committees. Yet striking a balance between tradition and innovation remains key to keeping the format relevant. Some elements of the Aarhus programme reinforced this established structure; others deliberately tested it.
For the first time, the EAHN Board organized its own panel on architectural history education. We chose to place it outside the main programme and open it to all participants, creating a different kind of space for collective discussion. Book launches also became an unexpectedly substantial part of the conference: there were so many that we had to pair them, sometimes producing interesting combinations. They worked particularly well alongside the publishers and editors traditionally present at EAHN conferences, making us wonder whether future editions might also make more room for books published in languages other than English. Alongside the well-attended Special Interest Group meetings, the launches made the first day an integral part of the conference rather than simply an arrival day.
The thematically organized city tours, grouped this time into a single afternoon rather than spread across the conference days, provided a much-appreciated break from the sessions on the penultimate day. They brought participants back together at the welcoming reception hosted by the Aarhus School of Architecture, followed by the conference dinner – a traditional format that proved highly popular. Their appeal, as well as that of the frequent coffee and lunch breaks and receptions, reminded us that, for all the importance of papers and sessions, conferences also depend on creating informal spaces in which an academic community can actually meet.
Architecture itself played a crucial role in shaping those encounters. The yellow-brick campus, its carefully composed landscape, and the superb University Aula provided a distinctive environment for the conference. During the traditional opening ceremony, the youth choir Aarhus U suddenly entered the solemn space of the Aula, singing its way towards the stage, where the performers continued their powerful delivery. The intervention became a welcome and memorable disruption of an otherwise familiar ceremonial sequence – and perhaps an apt image for the EAHN conferences themselves: an established format that still finds ways to surprise us.
Some photos
Photograph by Katharina Ya.
