Microhistory is key to the Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity project. In a series of three reading seminars, we will present and discuss some foundational microhistory contributions, a few more recent texts with microhistorical implications, as well as a 1951 detective novel. The seminar will highlight methodological, theoretical and […]

Timothy Hyde, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, traces an architectural arc that begins in the nineteenth-century mining camps of Gold Rush-era California, and proceeds to the transcontinental ambitions of monuments in the American mountain west, to arrive at the contemporary legal registers of preservation and historical recording. This itinerant American architectural history reveals a mineralogical provenance […]

Judith Clark, exhibition-maker and Professor of Fashion and Museology, University of the Arts London, will discuss two current research projects that consider new ways of exhibiting examples of 17th century conservation: “After Lady Anne Clifford” and “The Judgement of Paris VIII: after Alessandro Algardi.”

Artist Rachel Whiteread has made casts and drawings for more than 30 years in an effort to define the space between positives and negatives, public and private, manufactured and hand-made objects—always with concision, intelligence, beauty, and power. At the National Gallery of Art, an unprecedented and comprehensive survey exhibition of Whiteread’s celebrated career introduces a […]

Architects have for their activities of drawing, writing and building always depended upon the potential of particular tools –ranging from practical instruments such as straight edges, French curves, compasses, rulers and pencils to conceptual tools such as working drawings, collages, photographic surveys, infographics, diagrams, casts and mass models. As technologies advanced the toolbox of architects […]

Periodization and obsession with newness still dominate how we think of architecture’s relationship to time. At the EAHN Biannual Conference in Dublin, Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Yale University and on the OCCAS board, and Mari Lending organized a double session on Time Travel, to investigate conflating or competing temporalities and to discuss convoluted constellations of architecture and […]

Mari Lending, professor of history of theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design and co-founder of OCCAS, gave a key note presentation, titled ‘Fabrics of Reality in Fiction’, at the Reading Architecture symposium. The event was organised by the History and Theory Program, School of Architecture, McGill University and hosted at the Benaki Museum in Athens, […]

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, […]

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 & […]

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 […]

The ambition to exhibit architecture always entails a paradox: how to exhibit something so large and complex as a building or a city or how to represent something as elusive as an architectural experience that unfolds in space and time? The Yale Symposium Exhibiting Architecture: A Paradox? invited OCCAS scholars Mari Lending, Léa-Catherine Szacka, and […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

OCCAS hosted the symposium “Heritage Values in Growing Cities” at AHO. Organized by Thordis Arrhenius and Lothar Diem in collaboration with Oslo municipality’s heritage management office, the event was conceived as part of officially celebrating the centenary for Norway’s Directorate for Cultural Heritage. The symposium addressed questions on current practice in heritage management in relation […]

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 […]

Resonating with chief curator David Chipperfield’s theme “Common Ground” for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2012, the School of Architecture, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, is organizing the panel “Shifting Ground” in the biennale’s special program for universities. Léa-Catherine Szacka, Centre Pompidou, Paris; Pippo Chirra, MAXXI Architettura, Rome; Mari Lending, Oslo School of Architecture and Design; […]

OCCAS scholars Thordis Arrhenius, Jorge Oterio- Pailos and Lothar Diem will participate in the Inaugural Conference of the Association of Critical Heritage Studies on the Re/theorisation of Heritage Studies. The Association of Critical Heritage Studies, to be launched at this conference, will establish in association with International Journal of Heritage Studies (IJHS) an extensive network […]

This is the second OCCAS seminar on the future of the government quarter after the 22 July bombing. Randall Mason, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania will speak from the perspective of values-centered conservation. Mattias Ekman will comment on the ongoing debate about demolition or restoration. Christian Ebbesen will introduce value assessment in relation to the work done by the ministry of government administration (FAD).

Scholars from Place and Displacement: Exhibiting Architecture gathered in Rome at the Norwegian Institute for a seminar: On Scale. The participants took scale to task to reconsider its relevance within the historical and contemporary practices of exhibiting architecture, amongst the city whose history perhaps best problematizes the issue. The program, which considered issues of monumentality and preservation, models and […]