This international symposium is part of the ANR research project Mapping Architectural Criticism, which aims to develop a field of research on the history of architectural criticism, from the last decades of the 19_^th century to the present day. The symposium intends to debate two key questions related to the geographies of criticism: what are criticism’s disciplinary boundaries and which territories has criticism shared from the last decades of the 19_^th to the end of the 20_^th century with other disciplines.

Presentation

This international symposium is part of the ANR research project Mapping Architectural Criticism (http://mac.hypotheses.org), which aims to develop a field of research on the history of architectural criticism, from the last decades of the 19_^th century to the present day. The symposium intends to debate two key questions related to the geographies of criticism: what are criticism’s disciplinary boundaries and which territories has criticism shared from the last decades of the 19_^th to the end of the 20_^th century with other disciplines.

In the first place, the symposium interrogates the overlapping of architectural criticism with different kinds of architectural writing, in particular those pertaining to architectural history and theory, but also those stemming from other disciplines.

The symposium is equally aimed at highlighting the relationships, the common terrains, and the conceptual tools that architectural criticism has in common with other genres of criticism, such as art criticism and literary criticism.

The term “territory” is used here to refer primarily to the various disciplinary fields on which criticism relies and from which it borrows its concepts and patterns of interpretation, as well as its intellectual tools. The term “boundary”, for its part, is used to denote the zones of exchange and confrontation between criticism, history, theory and other types of writing on architecture, as well as between architectural criticism and other forms of criticism. The main aim of the symposium is to map these territories and delineate these boundaries.

Ce colloque international s’inscrit dans le Programme ANR Mapping Architectural Criticism (2015-2017), dont l’objectif est de développer un champ de recherche sur la critique architecturale des dernières décennies du XIXe siècle à aujourd’hui. Il débattra deux questions clé, relatives aux « géographies » de la critique d’architecture : ses frontières disciplinaires et ses territoires partagés, notamment avec la critique d’autres disciplines, depuis les dernières décennies du XIX_^e siècle.

Le colloque interroge les frontières et les terrains communs de la critique avec différents types d’écrits sur l’architecture : il vise à mettre en évidence les relations, les terrains communs et les outils conceptuels que la critique architecturale partage avec l’histoire de l’architecture, les théories, mais également avec des écrits émanant d’autres disciplines.

Le symposium met également en lumière les relations, les terrains et les outils conceptuels que la critique architecturale partage avec d'autres « genres » de critique, comme la critique d'art ou la critique littéraire.

Le terme « territoire » se réfère ici principalement aux divers champs disciplinaires auxquels la critique emprunte ses concepts et modèles d'interprétation, aussi bien que ses outils intellectuels. Avec le terme « frontière », nous souhaitons évoquer les zones d'échange et de confrontation entre critique, histoire, théories architecturales et d'autres types d'écriture sur l'architecture, aussi bien qu'entre la critique architecturale et d'autres formes de critique. Le colloque tentera de cartographier ces territoires et d’esquisser ces frontières.

Programme

Monday, April 3, 2017

Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art, salle Vasari

09:30 Registration and Welcome Address

09:45 Introduction

Session 1. Intellectual Territories: Borrowing Tools and Rhetorics from Other Disciplines

Chair: Paolo Scrivano, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

10:15 Stefania Kenley Independent Scholar, Paris: Blind Spot in the Visual Field of Art-architecture Criticism

10:45 Valeria Lattante AUIC, Politecnico di Milano: The Concept of Tradition from T. S. Eliot Literary Critic to E. N. Rogers Architectural Theory

11:15 Coffee break

11:30 Raúl Martínez Department of History and Theory of Architecture, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya-BarcelonaTech.: Geoffrey Scott’s The Architecture of Humanism at the Inception of Bruno Zevi’s Theoretical Corpus

12:00 Jasna Galjer Department of Art History, University of Zagreb: Cultural Exchange as Architecture’s Expanded Field

12:30 Adrian Anagnost Newcomb Art Department, Tulane University, New Orleans: Critique and Complicity: The Art Critical Lineage of Projective Architecture

Session 2. Political and Geographical Boundaries

Chair: Giovanni Leoni, Università di Bologna

14:30 Jianfei Zhu University of Melbourne: Searching for a Sensitive Criticism on Architecture of Contemporary China: The Case of He Jingtang

15:00 Charlotte Ashby Department of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London: The Archaeology of Finnish Architectural Criticism

15:30 Christina Pech Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm: Criticism on Display. The Swedish Museum of Architecture and the Production of History in the mid-1970s

16:00 Discussion and Pause

17:00 Key-note Lecture: Marco Biraghi, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano, What does it mean architecture?

Tuesday, April 4, 2017

Académie d’Architecture, Paris

09:30 Manuelle Gautrand (Présidente de l’Académie d’Architecture): Welcome Address

Session 3. Judging Architecture: Professional, Popular or Academic Criticism?

Chair: Réjean Legault, Université du Québec à Montréal

09:45 Christina Contandriopoulos Department of Art History, Université du Québec à Montréal: Against the Wall: the Birth of Architectural Criticism in Early 19th Century Paris

10:15 Michela Rosso Department of Architecture and Design, Politecnico di Torino: Architectural Criticism and Cultural Satire in the 1980s: Shared Territories and Languages

10:45 Coffee Break

11:00 Kristen Gagnon Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, Ottawa: Popular Architecture Criticism: A Definition, a Delineation and a Débâcle

11:30 Detlef Jessen-Klingenberg, Independent Scholar, Germany: Architectural Criticism as Cultural Criticism (“Kulturkritik”) and Professional Criticism (“Fachkritik”). A Case Study on the Example of Werner Hegemann

12:00 Discussion

12:45 Lunch Break

Session 4. Professionalism: the Critic as a Specialist

Chair: Anne Hultzsch, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL London and OCCAS, Oslo University

14:15 Laurens Bulckaen and Rika Devos, BATir Department, École polytechnique de Bruxelles: Louis Cloquet (1849-1920): architectural writings of a critical engineer

14:45 Irene Lund Faculty of Architecture, Université Libre de Bruxelles – Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: The multiple origins of modernist architecture criticism in the Belgian avant-garde magazine 7Arts (1922-1927)

15:15 Patrizia Bonifazio Department of Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano: “Zodiac” (1957-1973). Art and technique to define architecture in front of the mass production

15:45 Lorenzo Ciccarelli Department of Architecture, University of Florence: Giovanni Klaus Koenig (1924-1989): Architectural Criticism between Semiology, Industrial Design and Rail Trains

16:30 Final Discussion / Roundtable / Table ronde

Scientific Committee

• Nathalie Boulouch (Université Rennes 2 and Archives de la critique d’art),
• Anne Hultzsch (Bartlett School London and OCCAS, Oslo University)
• Hélène Jannière (Université Rennes 2)
• Réjean Legault (Université du Québec à Montréal)
• Giovanni Leoni (Università di Bologna)
• Paolo Scrivano (Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University)
• Laurent Stalder (ETH Zurich, gTA)
• Suzanne Stephens (Barnard College, Columbia University)
• Alice Thomine-Berrada (Musée d’Orsay, Paris)

Contact

mappingcritarch@gmail.com

helene.janniere@univ-rennes2.fr

Website

http://mac.hypotheses.org/