‘The Ceiling’ was the topic for Mari Hvattum’s panel session at the 9th biennial conference of the European Architectural History Network EAHN in Aarhus, 17-21 June 2026. Picking up from the AHO ceiling seminars, the ceiling session explored the meaning, making, and materiality of ceilings in 20th and 21st-century architecture. Anna Bortolozzi (University of Stockholm) […]

By playing with the alphabet’s presumed order within a longstanding, venerable genre, Provenanance in Architecture. A Dictionary (ed. Uwe Fleckner and Mari Lending, Hatje Cantz, 2025) and The Architect and the Animal (ed. Kostas Tsiambaos, MIT Press, 2025) propose different ways of describing what constitutes architecture and architectural thinking and, importantly, make strong claims as […]

14-15 November, 2024, the exploratory seminar Semper in Italy took place at Villa I Tatti, The Harvard University Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence. While Semper lived (and died) in Italy, and was profoundly influenced by Italian architecture, his relationship to Italian culture is little explored. Organized by I Tatti’s director Alina Payne in collaboration […]

An interdisciplinary conference on the 19th-century architect, designer, and printmaker Owen Jones took place in Oxford 1-2 October 2024. Organized by the Ashmolean Museum, the conference explored Jones’ work and cultural context, looking particularly at the professional and scholarly networks of which he was a part. OCCAS scholar Mari Hvattum contributed with a lecture on […]

2023 witnessed the publication of the first Norwegian translation of Vitruvius’ De Architectura (Om arkitektur, Gyldendal). The event concludes a grand publishing effort finally giving all the Nordic countries a Vitruvius-translations of their own. To mark the occasion, The Centro Studi Vitruviani, located in Vitruvius’ hometown of Fano on the Adriatic Coast, invited one speaker […]

In the hugely profitable print industry of the sixteenth century, copyrights, or so-called privileges, offered an apparently effective protection for popular designs. But printmakers soon found ways to manipulate these designs in ways that constantly challenged the idea of a copy. The lecture addresses how these creative deviations affected the image of ancient Rome and […]

When Napoleon entered Egypt in force in 1798, he brought an army of draughtsmen alongside his soldiers. Tasked with depicting the country from its smallest insects to the greatest monuments, drawing was intrinsic to the French imperial ambition and would continue to be so as the European continent grew obsessed with the vestiges of a […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]