Renewed Histories

Du 01.03.2022 à 13:15
au 10.05.2022
Lecture series

Series of lectures coordinated by Paul Bouet, Fanny Lopez and Frédérique Mocquet

This series of lectures aims at exploring how the grand narratives of architectural history are challenged by current concerns raised by colonial and postcolonial studies, gender studies, and the environmental humanities. We invite those, at the intersection of these approaches, to question history’s objects and actors, its main topics and issues, its usual periodization and geographical areas. By renewing the canonical interpretations foundational to our discipline, we can begin to imagine narratives which are more complex and situated, emancipating and plural, and each with the capacity to shed light on our present time.


From the Enlightenment to the present, the speakers will examine discourses which have impacted the very form of architecture, analysing the racial considerations that underlie the theory of styles, or investigating the role French and German colonizations in Africa played in the emergence of modern architecture. The relationship between modernism, feminism and environmentalism will also be questioned through women architects and planners such as Sibyl Moholy-Nagy or Jaqueline Tyrwhitt, whose humanist, vernacular and bioregional conceptions offer counterpoints to the dominant vision of the postwar period. The environmental predicament will be historicized by showing how it underlies Western architecture and urbanism, including in colonial and postcolonial contexts. These talks, given by prominent historians, will contribute to renewing the histories and theories of architecture that we are writing and teaching.

Semester programme