Ever since the theoretical turn of the 1960s, the status of the building as main architectural object keeps taking more and more forms. Whether as the reification of power structures, as a facilitator of participatory processes, as the locus of phenomenological content, as the hypostatization of terms from other systems of thought, as a vehicle to reflect upon unmediated practices, as a catalyst to investigate the psychology of perception, as amenable to mirror processes in the natural world — its increasing epistemological diversification is an index for the growing sophistication of the field of architectural history and theory. Within this tendency, however, the building emerges more often as a medium through which to tap into another domain —if not as altogether absent— than it does as the ultimate realm of research in its own right.

This event will pose the question whether projects that take the building as their primary concern can today extend the bounds of possibility for the production of discursive knowledge in a substantial fashion. In a day-long series of conversations, PhD candidates, historians, theorists and architects from London and United States will discuss a number of case studies in terms of how they embody design concepts that are historically significant, and how those might be turned into theoretical frameworks beyond the boundaries of architecture.

With Mark Cousins (AA), Francisco Gonzalez de Canales (AA), Mark Cambpell (AA), Thomas Weaver (AA), Marina Lathouri (AA), Adrian Forty (UCL), John McMorrough (U. Michigan), Rafi Segal (Columbia), Penelope Dean (UIC), Sylvia Lavin (UCLA/Princeton), Mario Carpo (Yale), AA PhD candidates Aldo Urbinati, Manolis Stavrakakis, Alexandra Vougia, Costandis Kizis and Gabriela García de Cortázar, and US PhD candidates Aaron White (Columbia), Bryan Norwood and Etien Santiago (Harvard) and José Aragüez (Princeton).

Open event. With the support of the PhD Programme.

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