Rome Teaching Workshop 2022

The 2022 Rome Teaching Workshop addressed the history of architectural theory in the broad scope of time from the 1960s to the present. Through four lectures by AE Rome Workshop teaching fellows, Michael Osman, Anna Neimark, Stelianos Giamarelos and Roberto Damiani, and through two debates that included additional participants, Alessandro Toti and Gabriele Mastrigli, the teaching workshop addressed a number of themes from biopolitics and power, to medium specificity, conceptual architecture, and criticality, to the relationship between critical regionalism and postcolonialism to architectural theory’s relationship to the history of the Left and to changes in the economy (and particularly to Keynsian welfare state to Hayakian neoliberalism), the professionalization of history, theory and criticism, and the demise of a critical public sphere in architectural culture, as well as transformations in the domain of ideology and in media-technical conditions.

Location

Rome, Italy

Date

30 May 2022 — 09 Jun 2022

Venue

Palazzo Pio, Rome, Italy

2022 Rome Teaching Fellows

Michael Osman
Anna Neimark
Stelianos Giamarelos
Roberto Damiani

2022 Respondants

Alessandro Toti
Gabriele Mastrigli

Thanks

With sponsorship from Virginia Tech

Program/Poster

Michael Osman, "Hegemony as a Political Theory of Architecture"PLAY

Description

Michael Osman’s lecture, “Hegemony as a Political Theory of Architecture” takes his audience through a close reading of Michel Foucault’s theory of power, and particularly the relationship between the city, imperialism and biopolitics. Having focused on the more familiar context of France linking instruments of knowledge production (architectural drawings, and in particular the design methods of JNL Durand) with the imperial context of Napoleon in Egypt, Michael then drew new connections and relationships to the parallel founding of the Architectural Profession in the United States with figures such as Richard Upjohn, Edward Shaw and George E Woodward.

date and duration

May 30th, 2022 (107:57mins)

Anna Neimark, "The boundary between the arts, medium specificity, and instruments of practice" PLAY

Description

Anna Neimark’s lecture, “The boundary between the arts, medium specificity, and instruments of practice” combined her historical research into the topic of colour (moving from Newton to Descartes to Helmholtz to Goethe); theoretical reflections on the question of what architecture’s medium is; and an account of the work of First Office. It showed how architecture can emerge not just from big budgets and large projects but from careful attention paid to the many media which architects use-from paint specifications, rendering softwares, to drawing conventions in legal documents. She also showed us how to think conceptually and critically about the background norms and forms in which we operate.

date and duration

May 30th, 2022 (146:09mins)

Debate 1: "What are the significant changes in the history of architectural theory from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s?"PLAY

Description

The first debate in the 2022 Rome Teaching Workshop addressed the question: What are the significant changes in the history of architectural theory from the mid 1960s to the mid 1980s? Participants included (from Left to Right) Joseph Bedford, Alessandro Toti, Stylianos Giamarelos, Michael Osman, Anna Neimark and Gabriele Mastrigli. Everyone put forward widely different takes on the most important factors in this period; some emphasized larger changes in the history of the Left and changes in economic models from the Keynsian welfare state to Hayakian neoliberalism; others emphasized shifting relationship to modern architecture across these years; others focused on paradigm shifts in our understanding of knowledge (such as the rise of the history of science as a game changing paradigm); and others focused on discursive changes around key ideas and “isms”. Overall, the participants successfully showed how uncertain our interpretative models of this period really are, and raised far more questions than were answered

date and duration

June 2nd, 2022 (154:10mins)

Stylianos Giamarelos, "The Worlds of Critical Regionalism"PLAY

Description

Stylianos Giamarelos’s Lecture “The Worlds of Critical Regionalism” offered a historiographic analysis of the discursive landscape of “critical regionalism” from the 1980s to the present, addressing the relationship between critical regionalism and vernacular architecture, regionalist architecture, nationalism, globalization, world history, and postcolonialism.

date and duration

June 3rd, 2022 (53:41mins)

Roberto Damiani, "The Architect, the Public, and the 1960s' Theory Turn”PLAY

Description

Roberto Damiani’s lecture “The Architect, the Public, and the 1960s’ Theory Turn” argued persuasively that the professionalization of history, theory and criticism during the 1980s and the parallel professionalization of “theoretical architecture” in the same decade played a role in undermining architecture’s public sphere, which had been cultivated during the 1960s. His account of that public sphere drew upon the philosophy of Jurgen Habermas as well as an analysis of examples of architectural discourses and debate from Robert Venturi, Aldo Rossi, and George Baird.

date and duration

June 7th, 2022 (107:52mins)

Debate 2: "What are the significant changes in the history of architectural theory from the mid 1980s to the present?"PLAY

Description

The second debate in the 2022 Rome Teaching Workshop addressed the question: What are the significant changes in the history of architectural theory from the mid 1980s to the present? Participants included Joseph Bedford and Roberto Damiani. Joseph and Roberto discussed why the mid-1980s seemed so crucial to the transformations of theory, but also how changes in higher education, changes in the neoliberal economy, changes in politics around the “end of ideology,” and media-technical changes around the internet and social media, have all had their effects on the relationship between work to develop discourses that link architecture to rigorously explored ideas and to underlying ideological and political issues.

date and duration

June 10th, 2022 (150:03mins)