Common Room - Architecture, Democracy and Emotions since 1945

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Common Room - Architecture, Democracy and Emotions since 1945

Veranstalter
Till Großmann, Philipp Nielsen, Center for the History of Emotions, Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Veranstaltungsort
MPI for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin
Ort
Berlin
Land
Deutschland
Vom - Bis
26.05.2016 - 27.05.2016
Deadline
24.05.2016
Website
https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/de/forschung/geschichte-der-gefuehle/konferenzen/common-room-architecture-democracy-and-emotions-since-1945
Von
Philipp Nielsen

Architecture, power and emotions have long been closely connected, from Roman and Inca temples, over the gothic cathedrals of the Catholic church to the Forbidden City in Beijing. As Deyan Sudjic writes: „Architecture is used by political leaders to seduce, to impress, and to intimidate.“ In democracies the emotional calculus and palette is broader still. Not only seduction and intimidation, but also trust and belonging become important. Ideas about community and participation on the one hand, and architecture, space and emotions on the other become intimately linked.

Built environments enabled, (un)intentionally provoked, or methodically educated a variety of feelings towards different forms of democratic governance—here understood as a political claim as well as a practice. They did so through their conception, materiality and use. Architecture rendered ideas about emotions and their value for democratic governance concrete. Ideas about morality and conduct were inscribed into it. This, to some extent, is true for all government and official architecture. Yet particularly after the Second World War and during decolonization, almost all countries, regardless of actual practices of governance, claimed to be democracies or at the very least republics.

The conference takes this claim seriously for approaching these societies’ architecture. It focuses on three interlinked ways of politicizing and emotionalizing spaces: 1) The way in which democratic governments in the 20th century thought about the sensatory relationship between state and citizens as experienced through architecture; 2) the way citizens experienced their governmental institutions through built space; and 3) how citizens (and among them architects and urban planners) wanted to fashion democratic relations among themselves and with the state by way of built space.

Fifteen scholars from ten countries and five disciplines will debate how these themes played out in the organization of architecture and space, in the feelings that circulated within them, and how this can contribute to the challenged history of democracy. No matter if prefab housing or squatting in Eastern and Western Europe, refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and Iran, or Atatürk statues in Turkey, in each case ideas of participation, of architecture and society, and of emotions were manifest. Neither these ideas nor their connections and effects were static or uncontroversial. Picking up where history’s spatial turn and architecture’s emotional turn have left off, this conference seeks to unravel the close connections between politics, spaces and feelings.

Programm

Thursday, 26 May 2016

10:00: Welcome and Introduction (Philipp Nielsen and Till Großmann)

10:15 – 11:45: Panel 1 – Squatting
Chair: Tobias Bernet (Berlin)

Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite (London):
Family Squatting in 1960s and 1970s London

Udo Grashoff (London):
De-politicisation as a Formula for Success? Illegal Occupation of Flats in the German Democratic Republic (GDR)

11:45: Lunch Buffet

13:30 – 15:00: Panel 2 – Capitalism and Democracy
Chair: Yaara Benger (Berlin)

Tim Verlaan (Amsterdam):
Urban Redevelopment as Self-Development: Consumerist versus Culturalist Architecture in Utrecht, 1960-1973

Emre Gönlügür (Balçova-Izmir):
The Uneasy Lure of the Istanbul Hilton Hotel: A Showcase of Consumer Democracy in Postwar Turkey

15:00 Coffee Break

15:30 – 17:00: Panel 3 – The Image of Housing
Chair: Till Großmann (Berlin)

Anna Ross (Oxford):
Photographing Neighbourhood “Connectedness” in the two Germanies, 1970-85

Liat Savin Ben-Shoshan (Jerusalem/Tel Aviv):
Playing with the Image: Architectural Brutalism, Photography, and the Construction of Images of Public Housing in Post War Britain

17:00 Coffee Break

17:45 – 19:15: Panel 4 – The Politics of Public Housing
Chair: Benno Gammerl (Berlin)

Kavita Kulkarni (New York):
Mitchell-Lama Co-ops and the Affective Economies of Opportunity Over Integration in Postwar Central Brooklyn

Igor Tyshchenko (Kiev):
Constructing the Ideal Neighbourhood: “Lyrical” and Humane Soviet Residential Environment and its Decline in Post-Socialist Kyiv

19:15 Reception

19:45: Keynote Lecture
Spyros Papapetros (Princeton):
Fear, Defense, and Community in Frederick Kiesler’s Magic Architecture

Friday, 27 May 2016

9:30 – 11:00: Panel 5 – Representing the State
Chair: Philipp Nielsen (Berlin)

Carla Hoetink/ Harm Kaal (Nijmegen):
The Material Culture of Parliament: Architecture and Objects as Elements of Political Communication and Affection, 1945-2000

Rüstem Altinay (New York):
On the Father’s Lap: Public Art, Social Protest, and the Affective Politics of Infantile Citizenship in Turkey

11:00 Coffee Break

11:30 – 13:00: Panel 6 – Permanently Provisional
Chair: Joseph Ben Prestel (Berlin)

Azadeh Sobout (Belfast, video conference):
Politics and Poetics of Place-making: Boundaries of Self and Other in Golshahr

Hania Halabi (London/Jerusalem):
Future Memory and the Thief of Time: Traumatic Urbanism in Gaza between the Imaginary and the Real

13:00 Lunch Buffet

14:30 – 16:30: Panel 7 – Architectural Nostalgia
Chair: Daniel Morat (Berlin)

Karol Kurnucki (Kraków):
The Ups and Downs of the Defence of Socialist Modernist Architecture: The Concern for Material Heritage in the Uses of Democracy

Lesley Braun (Chicago):
Stuck in Kinshasa: Modernization, Erosion & Mobilty

16:30 Coffee Break

17:00 Final Discussion

Kontakt

Anja Berkes

Max Planck Institute for Human Development
Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin

berkes@mpib-berlin.mpg.de

https://www.mpib-berlin.mpg.de/de/forschung/geschichte-der-gefuehle/konferenzen/common-room-architecture-democracy-and-emotions-since-1945
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