PhD seminars series 2011-2012
The Project: the Rise and Fall of a Political and Artistic Paradigm.
Friday November 11th from 19.00 to 22.00 – J.J.P. Oud room
Second Seminar with Andrew Leach
Intellectual History and Architectural Culture
The profile of architectural history has changed in recent decades to increasingly accommodate research into the intellectual history of architectural culture. What some have called architectural theory’s historiographical turn emerged from the debates of the 1980s and 90s, granting writers of the last decade or so a (contestable) legitimacy to conduct historical research on architecture in this mode. Where the case for architectural history as architecture by other means has been relatively persuasive in many quarters, the more recent tendency to privilege historiographical and historiological matters has a less direct recourse to an idea of architecture made of books rather than buildings. If one task of architectural history in the twentieth century has been to construct and foster architecture’s historical consciousness, what is the work done by historians of historians and theoreticians in the present moment? The lecture will reflect on this problem through current and recent research projects.
Andrew Leach has over a decade’s experience teaching the history, theory and criticism of art, design, architecture and urbanism; and conducting research in universities, technical institutes and research academies in Australia, New Zealand, Italy and Belgium. He studied art history, architecture and urban planning at Victoria University of Wellington (BA,MArch), and earned his PhD from Ghent University under the supervision of cultural philosopher Bart Verschaffel.
At present a senior lecturer in Architecture at the Griffith School of Environment and an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow, Andrew held a UQ Postdoctoral Research Fellowship from 2006-8 and was appointed a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Queensland in 2010.
Andrew’s work on the Italian architectural historian and theoretician Manfredo Tafuri has secured him an international reputation as a writer and commentator on the intellectual history of post-second-world war architectural, urban and political culture in Europe
