SYMPOSIUM: Factory World: Architecture and Industrialization over Time and Space. London, 31 October 2019

Symposium: Factory World: Architecture and Industrialization over Time and Space. London, 31 October 2019

Organized by Mark Crinson and Claire Zimmerman
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).
Timetable.
11.30-11.45 – Welcome and introduction
Plan and Image
11.45-12.30 – ‘Ancoats, 1826 – or, how to represent a factory’ (Mark Crinson)
12.30-1.15 – ‘The planning of the factory in Germany, 1898-1918’ (Tilo Amhoff)
1.15-2.00 – Lunch
Environments
2.00-2.45 – ‘Getting to know the shape of smog’ (Peter Christensen)
2.45-3.30 – ‘Between cables, industry and home’: Women, building products and STC Factory, New Southgate in the interwar period’ (Katie Lloyd-Thomas)
3.30-3.45 – Tea
Transnationalism
3.45-4.30 – ‘Building the global factory – architectures of transnational clothing production’ (Anke Hagemann)
4.30-5.15 – ‘From Truscon to AMTORG: Moritz Kahn and the global networks of Detroit’ (Claire Zimmerman)
5.15-5.45 – Discussion
Venue. Keynes Library, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD
You can book your (free) tickets and access the abstracts of the symposium at this link.

Share this post

News from the field

Clara #14 | Call for its Position(s) section

Clara is launching a call for papers for its Position(s) section, to be published in issue 14. Clara is a peer-reviewed scholarly journal in architecture dedicated to topics, research methods and tools specific to the field. Each issue comprises a main thematic...

EAHN Executive Committee as of June 2026

Photograph by Katharina Ya. As unanimously agreed at the Annual Business Meeting and announced during the EAHN 2026 Biennial Conference in Aarhus in June 2026, Léa-Catherine Szacka of The University of Manchester became the new President of the EAHN, alongside Maarten...

Premio Alvise Trincanato / Alvise Trincanato Prize

The “Alvise Trincanato” Prize is established by the non-profit association “A testa in su”, in collaboration with the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, with the aim of supporting young scholars in memory of Alvise Trincanato, a doctoral...