This seminar talks about historical method via work in progress. Historians Elizabeth Sears of the University of Michigan and Hilde Heynen from KU Leuven will present two twentieth century contexts where ideas about history and ideas about building met. Focussing on the relationships between the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes in London between 1934 and 1964, Sears’ work confronts [...]

                  “Norske Svømmehaller” er et seminar som forener idrettsfaglig og arkitekturfaglig ekspertise med representanter fra norsk offentlig forvaltning. Formålet er å diskutere norske svømmehaller som arkitektur og kulturminner, sett i lys av rådende strategier for folkehelse, fysisk aktivitet og offentlig ressursbruk. Seminaret arrangeres i samarbeid mellom Even Smith Wergeland (AHO/OCCAS) og sentrale aktører [...]

In July 1798, General Bonaparte invaded Egypt with an army of soldiers, engineers and scholars. One month later, Admiral Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile. Situated between Europe and India, Egypt now became the Middle East for European empires. Since then, images of Egyptian landscapes and monuments have circulated as [...]

In July 1798, General Bonaparte invaded Egypt with an army of soldiers, engineers and scholars. One month later, Admiral Nelson destroyed the French fleet in the Battle of the Nile. Situated between Europe and India, Egypt now became the Middle East for European empires. Since then, images of Egyptian landscapes and monuments have circulated as [...]

The book Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction, written by Mari Lending and published by Princeton University Press, was launched in the gallery overlooking the Cast Courts at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London on January 16. The book was presented by Antonia Boström, Keeper of the Sculpture, Ceramics, Metalwork and Glass [...]

Piranesi and the Modern Age takes as a point of departure the prints of the Italian Etcher, architect and designer Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78). The exhibition explores the idea that piranesi not merely influenced the modern age – in film,  photography, art and architecture – but that the idea of the modern as such partly [...]

The book Exhibiting the Postmodern: The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale, written by Léa-Catherine Szacka and published by Marsilio, was launched at the Biennale di Venezia with a panel including the participation of Roberto Zancan (Chair UNESCO and IUAV Venice); Marco de Michelis (IUAV Venice); Oliver Elser (DAM Museum Frankfurt; Manuel Orazi (Università di Bologna), and Léa-Catherine [...]

The book Baroque Antiquity: Archaeological Imagination in Early Modern Europe, written by Victor Plahte Tschudi and published by Cambridge University Press, was launched at the residence of the Consul General in New York on October 13. The book was presented by Prof. Christopher Wood, New York University, and Prof. Victor Plahte Tschudi, AHO. The presentation [...]

The edited collection Debatten om stortingsbygningen 1836-1866, edited by Mari Hvattum, chronicles the heated debate over the Norwegian parliament building around the middle of the nineteenth century. Gathering 65 primary texts written by politicians, intellectuals, artists and architects in newspapers, magazines and proceedings, the collection brings to the fore the close relationship between architecture, publication culture, and public debate [...]

The Norwegian Renaissance Society is pleased to announce the three-day conference Renaissance Prototypes, Tensions of Past and Present in Early Modern Europe. ​Call for papers The conference Renaissance Prototypes will focus on that particular early modern notion of the past as composed of predictions of the future. “Prototype” was a term coined in the Renaissance [...]

Friday night July 17, 2015, the V&A holds a conversation between Jorge Otero-Pailos and Mari Lending on Otero-Pailos’  ’The Ethics of Dust: Trajan’s Column’, which is on view in the Cast Courts. The work was commissioned by the V&A as part of the show ‘All Of This Belongs To You’, co-curated by Rory Hyde, Corinna [...]

‘Hosting Experimental Preservation at the V&A’ is a roundtable event that coincides with the exhibition ‘All of This Belongs To You’ that features the work of artist and preservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos. This roundtable is co-organised by the Victoria & Albert Museum and Jorge Otero-Pailos, and brings together leading voices in this emerging field, and new [...]

“A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of postmodernism”. In 1980, reporting on the First Venice Architecture Biennale, French journalist Gérard-Georges Lemaire adapted Marx and Engels’ famous formula, used as opening passages of The Communist Manifesto, in order to describe the state of affaire in European architectural culture. But what exactly had happen to architecture between [...]

Modelling Time. The Permanent Collection 1925-2014 won the prize for the most beautiful non-fiction book of the year by the Norwegian graphics organization Grafill. The book is edited by Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum in conjunction with the AHO master studio “Architecture on Display”. Modelling Time is designed by Anders Hofgaard, NODE Berlin/Oslo, and published [...]

Charlotte Klonk, professor of art history at the Humboldt University in Berlin and member of the OCCAS advisory board, gave a key note lecture at the conference “Exhibiting the Every Day”, 19-20 March 2015. The conference is part of the study circle ‘Heterologies of the Everyday’, funded by the Nordic Summer University. Organised jointly by the [...]

The exhibition “A Creation of Our Time. The Debate over the Norwegian Parliament Building 1835-1860″ was officially opened at AHO on Tuesday December 16 by the President of the Norwegian Parliament, Olemic Thommessen. The exhibition shows relief models of six of the most contested projects for the Norwegian Parliament building, made between 1856 and 1860. In addition, [...]

As part of the Weekend Specials, the seminar “Architecture in Translation: The Mediation of Social and Urban Spaces” set out to explore translation in architecture from a number of angles. Sherry Simon, Shumi Bose, Gro Bonesmo, Anna Andersen, Marina Lathouri, Roberta Marcaccio, Mari Lending, and Joan Ockman presented, ending with a roundtable with Rem Koolhaas, [...]

Installation par of the Monditalia exhibition at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia,“a scan across the Italian territory from South to North, and more extensively from Africa to the Alps and Europe.” “Effimero: Or the Postmodern Italian Condition” tells the story of the series of ephemeral works of architecture constructed in [...]

At the third international meeting of the European Architectural History Network in Turin, the editors Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum will present the book Modelling Time: The Permanent Collection 1925–2014. Springing from a master studio at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and the exhibition Model as Ruin at the House of Artists in [...]

The roundtable Experimental Preservation will bring leading voices of this emerging field into conversation to critically examine its defining aesthetics, strategies and ambitions. The roundtable is co-organized and will be moderated by Thordis Arrhenius, Erik Langdalen and Jorge Otero-Pailos. Presentations by: Andreas Angeladakis, Architect, Athens Lucia Allais, Princeton University Svetlana Boym, Harvard University Reinhard Kropf, Helen & [...]

The Nordic Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale is the site for the launch of  Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, published with Lars Müller Publishers in Zurich. The book which springs from a symposium in Oslo held in 2013, includes new essays by Felicity D. Scott, Martin Braathen, Helena Matsson, Nathalie Hope O’Donnell, Daniel Birnbaum, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, [...]

Stepping down as Dean of GSAPP, Columbia University, Mark Wigley invited a group of scholars to explore the responsibility and opportunity for architectural theory. OCCAS scholar Mari Lending presented, together with Lucia Allais, Beatriz Colomina, Mark Cousins, Arindam Dutta, Keller Easterling, John Harwood, Catherine Ingraham, Mark Jarzombek, Spyros Papapetros, Beatriz Preciado, Felicity Scott, Pelin Tan, [...]

Mattias Ekman, formerly PhD candidate at Institute for Form, Theory and History at AHO in affiliation with OCCAS, successfully defended his thesis Edifices. Architecture and the Spatial Frameworks of Memory on 22 November 2013. The members of the adjudication committee were Adrian Forty (first opponent), Professor of Architectural History, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University [...]

Ninety years after Gunnar Asplund’s Italian journey, Nordic and Italian scholars gather in Rome to explore exchanges between Nordic and Mediterranean architectural cultures. Carnets, sketches, drawings, photographs, reports, letters and journals are studied to investigate the effects of architects’ travels between the North and the South across centuries. The symposium takes place at the Accademia [...]

Institut national d’histoire de l’art (INHA) in Paris hosts the seminar series Arts, innovation, industrie: Gottfried Semper et les débuts d’une science des artefacts, organised jointly by INHA, L’École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS), Musée des arts décoratifs, École nationale supérieure de création industrielle, and the University of Leiden. Mari Hvattum contributes to [...]

  Arkitekturdepoter: Piranesistikk og stavkirkeportaler, with essays by students from the OCCAS elective courses ”Architectural Fantasies: Piranesi &Co” and ”The Art of Collecting Architecture” will be launched at AHO this week. Victor Plahte Tschudi and Mari Lending led the seminars and edited and introduced the book. Carolina Santos Coelho, Thomas Johannessen, Torbjørn Kolbeinsen, Christiana Thorsen [...]

OCCAS has invited Pippo Ciorra, Chief Curator of Architecture, MAXXI, Rome to lecture on “Sustainability: A Claim for Aesthetics”, as part of The Oslo Triennale 2013. Ciorra will give a critical, exibitionary view on sustainability through Re-cycling and Energy, drawing on his two recent shows ENERGY. Oil and Post-Oil Architecture and Grids (2013) and Re-Cycle. [...]

For the ForArt lecture 2013, ForArt in collaboration with OCCAS, invited Mark Wigley, Dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, to explore architecture’s nervous encounter with liquids—the material flows in pipes and the immaterial flows of radio waves. The lecture “Pipeless Dreams” will be held at Litteraturhuset Friday at 6 pm, [...]

Arranged by Chitkara University, Punjab, India in collaboration with ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on 20th Century Heritage, Foundation Le Corbusier, Getty Foundation and several other local and international institutions the conference focused on the preservation, identification of 20-century heritage. With Chandigarh as a case, the conference examined the scope and the challenges of managing the recent [...]

The seminar “Architecture and Design Museums in Germany Today” takes OCCAS outside of Scandinavia to discuss continuity and change in museums. Guest lecturers Andres Lepik, Director of the Architecture Museum in Munich, and Esther Cleven, head curator of Design at the Bauhaus Museum in Weimar are both recent apointees to their posts. Their presentations focus the discussion on [...]

Within the framework of the OCCAS research project Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture, we have invited scholars from the new research field of architectural exhibitions to discuss on‐going work that explores the exhibition as an architectural medium par excellence. The three sessions – Display, Canon and Time – overlap and intersect thematically. The symposium will [...]

Pax Forlag and OCCAS invite to an open book launch and mini-seminar on the new anthology Vor Tids Fordringer. Norske arkitekturdebatter 1818–1919 [The Demands of our Time. Norwegian debates on architecture 1818–1919], edited by OCCAS-scholars Mari Lending and Mari Hvattum. The launch is held in Old Aker Church, Oslo, February 4 2013 at 1700. Speakers include Rune Slagstad, Håkon Gundersen, Kristin Bliksrud Aavitsland, and Helge Jordheim. Welcome!

Under the heading Exhibitions and the Canon of Modern Architecture, Wallis Miller and Mari Lending will co-chair two panels onat the annual NORDIK art history conference in Stockholm. “Part I: Exhibitions that Shaped Modern Architecture” and “Part II: Modern architecture After the Fact” will investigate the productive role of architectural exhibitions, as well as questions of [...]

The Routes project arranged an ambulatory seminar in the Stourhead gardens in Wiltshire, UK. Finola O’Kane from UCD Dublin, Stephen Daniels from the University of Nottingham, Katja Grillner from KTH Stockholm, and Antoine Picon from GSD Harvard joined the Routes team for inspiring discussions on the relationship between routes, landscapes, technology and architecture in the [...]

Wallis Miller and Dean Michael Speaks hosted a symposium called “Design Research: Four Examples from Scandinavia.”  Mari Lending (AHO), Katja Grillner (KTH, Stockholm), Jonas Runberger (White Architects, Stockholm) and Ville Kokkonen (Artek, Helsinki) discussed the implications of pursuing design as research at a university, in practice and in manufacturing with the faculty of the College of [...]

Are national histories of architecture any longer relevant, and what is a “Norwegian” history of architecture, anyway? Given the plans to write a new history of Norwegian architecture, these are topical questions. Invited scholars and PhD students from several universities presented position statements and papers on this one day seminar on the historiography of Norwegian [...]

OCCAS and Artifice Books celebrate the launch of the Fragile Monument by  Thordis Arrhenius at this year’s Venice Biennale. Duncan Mccorquodale of Artifice books on architecture will be in  conversation with OCCAS scholars Thordis Arrhenius, Mari Lending and Jorge Otero Pailos on the contemporary need  for critical architectural scholarship and publications. Heritage objects today—monuments, city-quarters, regions,  [...]

OCCAS scholar Anders V. Munch launches his new book Fra Bayreuth til Bauhus. Gesamtkunstwerk’et og de moderne kunstformer, Aarhus University Press (2012).  Over more than 600 pages, Munch’s study is a veritable tour de force, following the concept of the Geamtkunstwerk from Richard Wagner’s seminal texts and beyond modernism, casting new light on the history and historicity [...]

Mark Cousins, Director of Histories and Theory at the Architectural Association, London will speak on The Cliché. The cliché represents an insoluble problem for language and art in modernity. Technology, cities and forms of signification all entail a radical increase in the volume and density of discourse. This produces both a standardisation of discourse and a [...]

  On Thursday May 16th the Norwegian Research Council announced that OCCAS has entered the final application round for becoming a Center of Excellence.  Of the 139 original applicants, 29 center proposals have entered the final round of the competition for 5+5 years extensive funding. OCCAS is applying with the project “Nordic Architectural Culture, 1850–2050” [...]

For the second international EAHN meeting in Brussels, Wallis Miller and Mari Lending will chair the panel New ideas, New Models? Architectural Representation and its Object in the Twentieth Century. The architectural model represents a particular mode of reflection. Oscillating between the abstract and the concrete, the model is a working tool for conceiving, developing, [...]

Professor Mari Lending presents the keynote lecture “On Architectural History in the Architectural Studio.” The conference, arranged by professors Claes Caldenby and Fredrik Nilsson, Chalmers, gathered architects, scholars and conservationist to discuss the role of architectural history in contemporary practice.

Wallis Miller and Mari Lending will chair the panel: Exhibitions and the Canon of Modern Architecture. What do we know about the role of exhibitions in the formation, confirmation, and rejection of the canon in the field of the History of Modern Architecture? There has been much recent interest focusing on the role of exhibitions [...]

Organized by Wallis Miller, Mari Lending, and Erik Langdalen and The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo this one day seminar will consider issues surrounding the installation of a new permanent exhibition of Norwegian architecture. This enterprise poses interesting dilemmas, as the exhibition has to deal with the troubling concept of a national canon, the selection of emblematic works and the overall curating of architectural history. The National Museum will plan the exhibition in collaboration with OCCAS.

Léa-Catherine Szacka presents her PhD dissertation Exhibiting the Postmodern: Three Narratives for a History of the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale. The 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale ‘The Presence of the Past’was a multi-faceted display of international contemporary architecture with an Italo-American twist. Successfully playing on postmodern form and content, this exhibition marked a new relation between the worlds [...]