Domesticating Life

by Kostas Tsiambaos PhD, Associate Professor, NTUA School of Architecture

The sessions of the ‘Domesticating life’ thread could be described as efforts to examine typologies, geographies and scales that go beyond the architectural, in order to acquire a more insightful knowledge and understanding of architecture itself. Without doubt, the originality of the sessions’ themes was one of the reasons they were selected by us, the conference’s scientific committee, but originality was not an end in itself; the benefit was much bigger, as I will explain later.

In Animal, Industry, and Labor animal farming architectures were seen as types of genetic economies and technologies, bio-cybernetics, synthetic environments and other biopolitical infrastructure. New types of buildings and reuses of existing spaces (even underground ones) were related to new types of humans and animals, while ideas about “the chicken of tomorrow” or “Mother cow” were linked to forms of civil life with specific nationalist or colonialist references. 

In the session on Displaying Gardens and the Exhibition Cultures the plants and gardens in international exhibitions, from mid 19th century Paris to mid 20th century Britain and Spain, together with the parks’ water infrastructure and elaborate pavilions revealed various geopolitical, performative, heritage and aesthetic aspects in a global, evolving and self-regulating context of cultural diplomacy. The question of the other, promoted or represented, proved rather productive.

Plantation Worlds, Plantation Architectures focused on plantations from the US to South-East Asia both as liminal spaces and hubs of imports and exports of goods and technologies. In terms of research methodology, we discussed how a presenter’s family history served as documentation and biopolitical reflection or what does distribution of intellectual work and interpretive authority could be like.

The production, distribution and consumption of beverages was discussed inArchitectural Objects of Colonial Consumption. From the Inca Empire and the Ottoman Empire to 18th century France and Britain, objects and their uses were related to marginal spaces, visible and invisible flows, cultural geographies and gender identities. The small scale of chocolate kitchens and sugar architectural formations revealed the multifaceted aesthetic articulation of hidden colonial networks.

In Stilled Lives and Living Materials the discussion on materials and their formations, from the geological scale to the decorative one, brought forward theories on animism and vitalism in a fabricated natural-architectural continuum while re-examining the animated ontology of rocks, timber, bamboo and corals as, more or less conscious, eco-critical extensions of architectural design and construction.

Finally, the session Water as an Ecological Mediator in Architecture: Tracing Connections from Antiquity to the Modern Age offered different case studies of waterforms, waterworks and waterscapes in the longue durée, highlighting water as mediator between the natural and the technical, the legal and the social, the symbolic and the transcendental. Designing with water becomes thus an act of communal and environmental integration.

I will close this synopsis with a comment on what, in my opinion, was the most important contribution of this thematic track.

In Homer’s Ulysses the return to the home is not direct at all. After his 10-year voyage in distant lands and seas, Ulysses returns to his home as a homeless, a stranger. His delayed homecoming is, of course, for a reason. Ulysses moves around his home, encircling it, he meets and interacts with known and unknown persons, and nobody recognizes him (except one; his dog, Argos). This journey far away from home and the movement around the home is a precondition for a return to the home that is conscious and meaningful. The knowledge acquired from the encounter with the other is what provides content and truth to the point of departure.

This is, likewise, what the sessions of ‘Domesticating Life’ thematic track did: they reminded us that our disciplinary dislocation and creative distancing is a prerequisite for a rethinking of architecture in an era of many challenges and few certainties. A the end, the home we return will be another home, both familiar and new; a place in which we can feel safe, recognized, connected, and, as in James Joyce’s Ulysses able to enjoy communion over a cup of chocolate.

Thank you.

Edges/Interfaces

by Christina Ntanovasili, PhD fellow, Aarhus University

Hi everyone, my name is Christina, I am a PhD student in art history here at Aarhus University, and although my background is in architecture, my PhD research has expanded to the art history and cultural history of worldviews, the cosmos, and the world as a whole in late modernity. This short introduction is just to preface the fact that I was delighted to attend the 3rd thematic track of Edges/interfaces, 6 panels that spanned themes that were very interesting in and of themselves, but also relevant to the subjects of the cosmic, the planetary and the beyond.

The panels on ‘The Ceiling’ and ‘Architectural Histories and Practices and the Aerial Spatial Revolution’ during the first day made indeed a very interesting case for the upper regions, those of buildings and those of outer space. The papers explored architectural histories of ceilings that inspired impressions of starry and open skies, ceilings evoking the sensoria of Baroque philosophy and the irrationality of cosmic forces, histories of genuine collectible and portable ceilings, but also modular ceilings paradigmatic of an industrial universality; ceilings, lastly, that brought us back down to earth, with sustainability and indeed circular approaches in mind.

From ceilings to the Aerial Spatial Revolution, the papers in the afternoon panel surveyed popular cultural images and imaginaries of conquered skies and futuristic cities, of helicopter networks and volumetric city planning, of the contested history of aerial data extraction, and the vertical infrastructure of planetary watching. We learned about the distorted fields of vision of photogrammetry in aerial mapping, and about a history of roof building entangling human and machine labour in the air and on the ground. These papers sparked lively discussions about the architecture of layers, of media, the sky, the elemental, and the sensorial; they provoked thoughts about technological solutions and imaginaries. From ceilings to skies, air, and underground, failures, practices, critiques, and counter-histories helped us contemplate architecture framed as built worlds situated in larger worldviews.

The two panels on Friday, ‘On Thresholds and Junctions – Reading Transport
Architecture across Scales’ and ‘Frontiers: Kinetics of Expulsion, Expansion, and Contestation’ motivated an engagement with more overlooked histories of transient architectures and more contested and expanded notions of edges and boundaries. The papers’ topics spanned early 20th c. screen environments, colonial regimes of permeability and privacy in railway architecture, ludic reclaim and appropriation of highway infrastructure, mobility regimes and dromological histories of road making, Apartheid histories of railway architectures, but also resistant spirituality of bus churches.

The papers in the afternoon panel surveyed histories of coastal regimes and geopolitical operations, infrastructures, and experimental frontiers entangling logistical and biological timeframes of fish, operations, and labour. We encountered cross-cultural histories of a river, flood control, collaboration, and friction, glimpsed into architectural career-building in the context of military-industrial chronopolitics of the Sahara Desert, and we learned, lastly, about extreme architectural frontiers as a hyphenation of alpinism and meteorological observation. We learned that frontiers can be a desert, a river, a mountain, a season, but also the less naturally defined ones of human and non- human life and labour, as well as the geopolitical and social constructs of national territory and language. What I think stood out in the discussions were the notions of processes of circulation and sorting: the sorting of movement, speed, race, gender, urban and rural space, the contradictions of sorting space for play and for resource extraction.

The two last panels today rounded o^ the thematic track with the role of architecture in colonial empires and the subterranean milieu and imaginary, respectively, forming a full circle indeed from the ceiling panel from the first day and the allegory of skies to the contested geopolitics on the ground and the strata underneath it. The morning panel on ‘Transimperial Contact Zones and Collision Space in Southeast Asia’ surveyed competition over territorial power and operations such as colonial tourism, philanthropy, and scientific enterprises. The colonial counter-imaginaries of a hospital/guesthouse, the materiality of defensive architecture, and the journey of materials and resources across overlapping empires were followed by topics of museum architecture and how the production of colonial space-time is reflected in the façade and image production. We learned, lastly, about transimperial commercial enterprises and their architectures and their impact on postcolonial imagining, and about radio architecture and regimes in intercolonial and transimperial encounters.

The afternoon panel, ‘Notes from the Underground: Politics, Aesthetics, and Ecologies of the Subterranean’ , invited us to consider metaphors and realities of subterranean spaces, and attend to issues of geopolitics and thermopolitics and questions regarding technology and ecology. Papers explored the thermocultural architecture of cellars and the way they developed as heat sources evolved; they explored the history of subterranean modern urbanism, across utopia and technocratic realism, and the history-myth of gold storage in the Alps. We followed presentations on geological clouds, the immaterial materiality and geological operations of data centre architecture, and, lastly, we were presented with both the toxic violence of extractivism, towards humans and environments, and how urgent the politics of attention, care, and reparation are, also for undoing epistemic silence.

To sum up, the 6 panels and 30 papers did a wonderful job of enlightening, nuancing, and engaging with the overarching theme of Edges/Interfaces in this track. A final observation, as thoughts and discussions still marinate, is that the papers, the presenters, and the audience dared and stayed ‘with the trouble’ and also stayed with the a^irmative. As such, they were successful in meeting this conference’s theme of studying and understanding architectural history, and indeed broader histories, of the past in the present. Thank you!

Worlds of Knowledge

by Davide Spina, PhD, Assistant Professor, University of Hong Kong

The ‘Worlds of Knowledge’ track brought together papers that examined how our understanding of architecture—and of the built environment more broadly—is created. Rather than treating buildings as self-evident objects, the papers emphasized the frameworks that make them meaningful in the first place: scientific expertise, narrative formations, specific terms and notions, devotional and political programs, and material conditions. What emerged was a strong sense that architectural knowledge is always mediated—produced through forms of description, circulation, and technical classification that both reveal and reshape their objects.

The ‘Building Science’ session established this clearly by presenting the city as both a setting for knowledge and one of its products, with papers on water governance, scientific institutional buildings, and imagined cities.

The following session, on guidebooks, made these questions especially concrete by focusing on forms of representation for a general readership. These publications, it was argued, do not simply record cities. They prescribe ways of seeing and moving through them, selecting what matters and turning complex urban environments into legible artefacts. Papers in this session showed that such representations are always bound up with power: a German guide to Turkey that framed ruins for mass tourism; English accounts of Granada that participated in the orientalist exoticization of the city; printed panoramas that translated distant overseas cities into a colonial spectacle for the British public; and Brisbane guidebooks that obscured Indigenous dispossession and the city’s penal origins in favour of a sanitised civic identity. Discussion emphasised that these media are structurally persuasive: they simplify, idealise, and normalise. One productive response proposed was not to seek some impossible neutrality in the genre, but to foreground the history of representation itself—that is, to make visible within these publications the successive lenses through which a specific locale has been understood over time.

The ‘Character’ session examined the epistemological function of this term in nineteenth-century architectural and civic debates. Here, ‘character’ appeared as an unstable category, used to name the perceived identity, ethos, or expressive force of buildings, landscapes, and peoples. The discussion stressed that character was never merely stylistic: it linked form to moral, cultural, and even anthropological claims. Papers on English neoclassical buildings, German and Andean monuments, and Swiss reconstructions of prehistoric villages showed how the term mediated between antiquarianism, emerging archaeology, ethnography, and classificatory science. It allowed observers to project meaning onto objects while presenting those projections as if they were discoveries internal to the objects themselves. A key insight was that character opened the canon to unfamiliar architectures, yet often did so by subsuming them within European intellectual frameworks. The session thus presented character not only as a means of translating difference, but also of domesticating it.

Panel number four, on spirituality and space in the long eighteenth century, shifted attention to the entanglement of religion, governance, and architectural practice. Papers in this session presented architecture as a site where Enlightenment ambitions, confessional programmes, and local political authority were materialised and brought into conflict. The eighteenth century thus emerged as a period in which competing epistemologies—religious, imperial, and administrative—overlapped and negotiated their claims in space.

Up next was the ‘Materials and Techniques on the Move’ session, which marked a shift from discursive frameworks to material conditions. With papers on the circulation of building materials, the transfer of construction know-how, and the limits imposed by local resources and skills, its central premise was that materials and techniques do not travel as easily as texts or images. The session made clear that architectural knowledge depends not only on representation but also on craft and the stubbornness of matter itself.

Finally, the panel on the Italian reception of Gothic architecture examined how this style, long framed as ‘foreign’ in the country, has been repeatedly interpreted there under shifting devotional, political, and historiographical agendas during the early modern period.

Overall, the ‘Worlds of Knowledge’ track reiterated in different ways that architecture does not simply ‘exist’ in the phenomenal world but is continually construed as an object of knowledge through words, images, and material practices.

Histories for the Present

by Prof. dr. Janina Gosseye, EAHN, TU Delft

The track that I had the pleasure to follow was called ‘Histories for the Present’ and gathered three roundtables and three sessions, which together touched upon the full spectrum of questions that everyone who is engaged in architectural historiography today grapples with in one way or another, including:

(1) Questions of authorship and narration. Or, put differently: Who writes architectural history and how

(2) Another question that this track put on the table was what theories inform, drive and sustain architectural historiography

(3) Several contributions also touched upon the question of what materials (or data) architectural historians work with and how this affects the stories that we tell

(4) This question, of course, often went hand in hand with questions related to the object of architectural history and the probing of the limits and boundaries of the discipline

(5) And finally, many of the papers that were presented and the discussions that were held also touched upon the tools or methods of the architectural historian.

I will give a short summary of each session in the order in which I saw them, to highlight the ways in which they touched upon these questions of authorship, narration, theories, materials, methods and tools and the object of architectural historiography. After this overview, I will summarize my overall impression of this track.

(1) The ‘I’ in architectural historiography examined how narration changes when the ‘I’ is brought into the story. A question that emerged from this roundtable was who this ‘I’ might be as not all contributions necessarily approached this ‘I’ as the figure of the architectural historian. In one example, a collective of contributors and researchers had actually been subsumed under a famed architectural historians’ confident first-person account. During the Q&A, questions were raised about what adding oneself into the narrative might bring and how to strike a balance between ‘not enough’ and ‘too much’; to avoid writing the architectural historiography equivalent of a selfie.

(2) In the session on ‘The 21st Century History of Architectural Theory’ the tussle between the autonomy and the heteronomy of theory re-emerged, with several contributors advocating for stronger cross-pollination with other fields, such as social and political theory with which, as one contributor noted, our discipline is ‘playing catch-up’ as conversations in these fields are further advanced. Curiously, the papers included in this session did not engage much with feminist theory, which had been carefully siphoned off into a separate session that took place at the same time.

(3) The session on ‘Rendering and Architectural Knowledge’ focused by and large on the shift that has occurred from analog to digital imagery which, some participants claimed, had destabilized the materials with which architectural historians work as digital images are always a provisional translation and simply one possible rendering of data that could take any other shape. The Q&A touched upon the methodological challenges that this condition of the architectural image under liquid modernity presents for architectural historians. But the session was not only concerned with imagery as material proper. Some contributions in this session were concerned with the technology that had enabled the generation of such digital images which at times lead us quite far away from buildings and the built environment into histories of computational systems and even nuclear physics, thereby challenging the object and limits of the discipline of architectural history.

(4) The same can be said for the session on ‘Excavating the Landfill’, which explored connections with urban history, construction and production history, as well as with geology, archeology, chemistry and even (to some extent) medicine.

(5) Finally, there were the two AI-related roundtables; one focused on the archive, the other on publishing. In the latter roundtable the specter of AI loomed so large that the short presentations tended to shy away from addressing its relationship with publishing head on. Fortunately, this connection between AI and publishing re-emerged in the Q&A, with the conversation (much like the one that had taken place in the roundtable on AI in the archives in the morning) oscillating between a positivist embrace of this new technology, exalting the possibilities afforded, with others cautioning against its limitations and pleading for guardrails. For me, the discussions became most interesting when questions of AI’s relation to capitalism and asymmetrical access to data and information surfaced, which I hope will be further explored in forthcoming EAHN conferences.

To conclude: If I were a cynic (which I am not), I would say that the track ‘Histories for the Present’ gave an impression of a discipline in a state of crisis that mirrors or at least parallels the global poly-crisis in which we find ourselves today. As architectural history courses are cancelled (or dramatically shortened) and as architectural historians are made redundant at an alarming rate in institutions across the world, we are fundamentally questioning those essential elements that underpin and condition our discipline; namely: authorship, narration, theories, materials, tools and methods and (even) the object of study. The result – and I am being deliberately facetious here – was quite a bit of navel-gazing; of examining the discipline itself. A brief anecdote: When I asked a fellow conference goer who had just attended two sessions in the ‘Histories for the Present’ track with me back-to-back if they would be joining me for the next one too, they simply said: “Oh no, I want to see some buildings now.”

And yet, it was also heartening to see how we, collectively, seem to be adhering to the received wisdom that one should never let a good crisis go to waste, by which I mean that it has become evident that many colleagues here have embraced this moment of apparent crisis as an opportunity for transformation; to rethink wat architectural history does or can do and how.