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 […]

Richard Anderson, University of Edinburgh, present his new book in the OCCAS Higher Seminar: After achieving international acclaim as a painter and designer, El Lissitzky set out in 1924 to convince the world—and himself—that he was also an architect. Working in relative physical isolation as he received treatment for tuberculosis, Lissitzky engaged in an international […]

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.”

The Director’s seminar at the Warburg Institute provides the digital launch for the international exhibition Warburg Models, together with a presentation of Haworth Tompkins’ architects model for the Warburg Renaissance project.With Ellie Sampson, Haworth Tompkins; and Tim Anstey, Mari Lending, Pernille Ahlgren, Nora Kilstad, Cathrine Sundem, Max Svendsen, Karina Tang and Mara Trübenbach, Oslo School of […]

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 […]

‘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 […]

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, […]

The Printed and the Built project held its first international symposium in Oslo, October 23–25, 2014. In addition to the local project team, the scholars invited were Caroline van Eck from University of Leiden, Adrian Forty from University College London, Richard Wittman from University of California, Santa Barbara, and Wallis Miller from University of Kentucky.   […]

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, […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 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 […]

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, […]

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 […]