The digital era allows architectural history and theory to be expanded in two separate and seemingly contradictory directions. On the one hand, new technologies of detection can reach points otherwise inaccessible to the human eye. These technologies allow us to approach material objects – artefacts, but also buildings and landscapes – in wholly unprecedented ways, seeking to unpack their magic encyclopedia. The chemical, microscopic and technological analysis of material surfaces, construction materials and colour coatings reveal their layered transparencies, providing a glimpse beneath the surface. On the other hand, historians can use representational models, data and algorithms to expand the repertoire of contemporary research, complementing this new archaeological approach to material analysis with an analytical form that manages and cross-references a large quantity of data. To demonstrate how the “documentary method” uses these new technological methods of analysis to engage with artistic practices and architectural design, this lecture will present a series of connected case studies from early 20th-century architectural modernism, Bauhaus histories and the hundred-year history of modernism’s migration, exile and instrumentalization for colonial expansion. It is part of ongoing research that studies buildings on both sides of the infamous Sykes-Picot border in order to connect them not only to the complex history of colonial control and occupation in the region, but also to modern architecture across Palestine and the Arab world, as well as to trans-Arabian infrastructures and routes of trade or exchange that are no more. Reading architecture to function both as a nexus and as a document of historical and political connections, this lecture will expand upon the idea of the memory palace to argue that architecture can be a navigational device for archive structures. To illustrate these ideas, Ines Weizman will present a series of short films and exhibition projects that she produced recently in collaboration with the Centre for Documentary Architecture.

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Ines Weizman is the Head of PhD/ MPhil Programme at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art in London. She is also the founding director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), an interdisciplinary research collective of architectural historians, filmmakers, and digital technologists. Her recent book Documentary Architecture/ Dissidence through Architecture was published in English and Spanish with ARQ Editiones, Santiago de Chile (2020). Weizman is the editor of the recently released publication Dust & Data: Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years, published with Spector Books, Leipzig (2019). In 2014, she was editor of Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, published by Routledge. Her book Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster, co-written with Eyal Weizman, was published in the same year by Strelka Press. Weizman has also worked on exhibitions and installations such as Repeat Yourself: Loos, Law, and the Culture of the Copy, exhibited at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as at the Architecture Centre in Vienna and the Buell Center at Columbia University, New York (2013). Other research and exhibition projects include: Celltexts: Books and Other Works Produced in Prison (2008, with Eyal Weizman), first exhibited at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin. In 2019 together with the CDA she curated the exhibition The Matter of Data (2019), which was shown in Weimar, Tel Aviv and Berlin.

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This public online keynote lecture is part of IGmA’s doctoral colloquium in collaboration with the doctoral programme of the RCA, London 15–16 April 2021 (participation in the colloquium upon invitation only). – Presentations by: Ortrun Bargholz, Maria Paez Gonzalez (RCA), Verena Hartbaum, Adina Hempel, Leo Herrmann, Elad Horn, Philipp Krüpe, Dasha Kuletskaya, Mahy Mourad, Martin Murrenhoff, Stefanie Reisinger, Philipp Sattler (RCA), Malgorzata Starzynska (RCA), Kathrin Eva Seitz. – Guest critics: Dietrich Erben, Anna-Maria Meister, Holger Schurk, Brigitte Sölch, Kerstin Thomas, Stephan Trüby, Ines Weizman.

Stuttgart Talks on Architecture (SToA) is an event series organized by the IGmA / Institute for Principles of Modern Architecture (Design and Theory), University of Stuttgart.
Concept: Prof. Dr. Stephan Trüby, M.A. Philipp Krüpe (IGmA)

SToA is supported by:

Stuttgarter Wohnungs- und Städtebaugesellschaft mbH
Stiftung Landesbank Baden-Württemberg
Bietigheimer Wohnbau GmbH

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IGmA-Promotionskolloquium, 15–16 April 2021
feat. RCA, London

DAY 1: 15.04.2021

Block 1 (Language: German)

09:00 Prof. Dr. Stephan Trüby „Start / Welcome“
09:15 Martin Murrenhoff: „Die Tiefe Stadt“
10:15 Verena Hartbaum: „Der Inszenierte Konsens. Architekturtheoretische Untersuchung zur Kulturellen Hegemonie in der Berliner Republik“
11:15 Pause / Break
11:30 Stefanie Reisinger: „Gego. Architektur als künstlerisches Vokabular“
12:30-13:30: Mittagspause / Lunch Break

Block 2 (Language: English)

13:30 Maria Paez Gonzalez (RCA): „Supreme (in)Formality the Productive Mastery of Silicon Valley ‘Tech’ Corporate Headquarters”
14:30 Philipp Sattler (RCA): „Trembling Worlds: Investigative Materialities and Rural Regimes of Ownership”
15:30 Pause / Break
15:45 Malgorzata Starzynska (RCA): „Machine Learning and Architectural Pedagogy: Unlearning Precedent, Confronting Historical Bias, and Proposing Futures Architecture”
16:45 Elad Horn: „The Hidden Economy of Architecture: Economic Transformations as Generator of New Architectural Idioms in Tel Aviv-Yafo during the 1980s and 1990s.”
17:45 Pause / Break
18:00 Keynote Lecture / Dr. Ines Weizman: „Threads and Hinges – The Global Flow of Architectural Elements”

DAY 2: 16.04.2021

Block 4 (Language: English)

09:00 Adina Hempel: „The Majlis – A public space for decision-making in the Arab world”
10:00 Mahy Mourad: „Aesthetics of Modernity: Architecture and Representations in Postcolonial Egypt”
11:00 Pause / Break
11:15 Dasha Kuletskaya: „Minsk – neoliberal shift in the model socialist city”
12:15–13:15 Mittagspause / Lunch Break

Block 5 (Language: German)

13:15 Kathrin Eva Seitz: „Renaissance der ethnologischen Museenc Eine Betrachtung ihrer Architektur sowie deren Zukunft im gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhang”
14:15 Philipp Krüpe: „Meme und Architektur. Von Paul Schultze-Naumburg bis dank.lloyd.wright – eine historiographische Aufarbeitung des Verhältnisses von Architektur- und memetischer Bildproduktion“
15:15 Pause / Break
15:30 Ortrun Bargholz: „Oberfläche und Erscheinung. Zur strategischen Nutzung zeitgenössischer historisierender Bauten“
16:30 Leo Herrmann: „Exodus – Projekt und Utopie in der absoluten Gegenwart”
17:30 Schlussdiskussion / Final Discussion & Farewell