»20 Questions on Architecture«

Tuesday Night Live is a event series at Technische Universität Darmstadt with international thinkers and architects to share their work in process and discuss with students, teachers and the public. The first season started in November 2020 with a series of seemingly straightforward questions answered (or disputed, questioned, reframed) by the guests.

»We are in the midst of a pandemic, important elections and a global climate crisis. So why would we start an event series now? Because we want to believe in the power of conversation and shared thought, and in the potential of architecture to re-imagine different and new worlds. We chose instagram live as format for everyone to check in rather than sign up for yet another lecture.« — Anna-Maria Meister

Season 1 — Winter 2020/21

10.11.2020, 19:00, Louise Lemoine

24.11.2020, 19:00, Jocelyn Froimovich

01.12.2020, 19:00, Dubravka Sekulić

08.12.2020, 19:00, Megan Eardley

15.12.2020, 19:00, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

22.12.2020, 19:00, Emily Shanahan

26.01.2021, 19:00, Andrés Jaque (changed date)

02.02.2021, 19:00, Igor Demchenko

09.02.2021, 19:00, Nora Akawi

16.02.2021, 19:00, Alla Vronskaya

Live on Instagram @atw_architekturtheorie #ATWTuesdayNightLive #20QuestionsOnArchitecture

Episode 1

Our first guest on Tuesday Night Live was Louise Lemoine of Bêka&Lemoine. The duo has stood out on the international architectural scene for the last 15 years through a cinematographic work known for its innovative nature and its tender and biting humor, which has disrupted the usual representation of contemporary architecture by putting people and uses at the forefront. Presented in major biennials and international cultural events such as the Venice Architecture Biennale, their films are also frequently exhibited internationally in museums and cultural institutions, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and also selected and awarded by some major film festivals. Ila Bêka and Louise Lemoine are currently teaching Diploma 16 at AA School in London.

Episode 2

Our second guest on Tuesday Night Live was Jocelyn Froimovich who is an architect licensed in Chile and New York State. She has worked for Bernard Tschumi, Weiss Manfredi, and Izquierdo Lehmann Architects. As an independent practitioner, her work ranges in focus and scale, from residential projects to installations. Current projects include the New Lorenteggio Library in Milan to be built by 2022 (in collaboration with Urtzi Grau, Stefano Rolla and Laura Signorelli) and other projects in New York State, Chile and Europe. She has taught at Columbia University, the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and the University of Liverpool.

Episode 3

Dubravka Sekulić is an architect and educator whose work focuses on the investigation of the transformation of the contemporary city and the relation between laws, property, and space. She is interested in the understanding (built) environment as an archive. She is a Senior Tutor at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art, London and holds a PhD in architectural history and theory from gta Institute for History and Theory, Department of Architecture, ETH Zürich. She regularly publishes and lectures around Europe.

Episode 4

We were delighted to welcome Megan Eardley as our next guest on Tuesday Night Live. She studies the intersections of architecture, science and technology, and political philosophy in southern Africa in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Her current research examines how the South African mining industry shaped models and concepts of life in deep space during the Cold War. While attending to histories of labor, race, and gender, she foregrounds questions about measurement, the language of standards, and the future of “the human” in environments that are hostile to biological life.

Episode 5

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, scholar, and Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her teaching and research interests are related to how struggling communities can gain greater access to resources, the mainstream economy, better governance, and ecological/social justice. While directing the MAS Urban Design at the Chair of Marc Angélil, Malterre-Barthes has earned her doctoral degree from the ETH in Zurich. Malterre-Barthes is a founding member of the Parity Group and of the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to improving diversity and gender equality in architecture.

Episode 6

Emily Shanahan is a visual artist working primarily with video and collage. Her interdisciplinary practice addresses issues of gendered labour and technology with special attention to the behaviors, gestures, and societal norms that circulate across media. She received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and completed the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. Her awarded work has been exhibited in Norway, Germany, Singapore, Canada, and the United States.

Episode 7

Andrés Jaque is an architect, writer, and curator. He is the founder of the Office for Political Innovation, a New York/Madrid-based agency working at the intersection of research, critical environmental practices, and design. He was awarded of Heinrich Tessenow Foundation and Graham Foundation, he received the Frederick Kiesler Prize (2016), the Silver Lion for Best Research Project at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, as well as the Dionisio Hernández-Gil Prize. Jaque’s work is and was exhibited in several important museums all over the world. He is the Chief Curator of the upcoming 13th Shanghai Biennale, titled Bodies of Water. Currently Jaque is the Director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at Columbia University.

Episode 8

Igor Demchenko is a postdoctoral architecture historian and taught at Illinois Institute of Technology, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and Columbia University. His research was supported by Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Swiss Government Excellence Scholarship, Canadian Center for Architecture, Aga Khan Program for Islamic architecture, and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library. His publications and conference presentations explore the theoretical problems of modern architectural conservation practices, the questions of non-Western architectural expertise, and the history of regional planning in the former Socialist Bloc.

Episode 9

Nora Akawi is a Palestinian architect and curator. She is assistant professor of architecture at the Cooper Union. Her projects focus on architecture’s entanglements in processes of erasure and exclusion in settler colonialism. Prior to joining The Cooper Union, Nora taught at Columbia University, where she was also the director of Studio-X Amman from 2012 to 2020. Recently curated exhibitions and festivals include Al Majhoola Min Al-Ard (She who has been vanished from the Earth) at the Biennale d’Architecture d’Orléans (October 2019), Sarāb, gathering experimental electronic music and performance from the Arab world (June 2019), and Friday Sermon, the Bahrain Pavilion exhibition in the Biennale Architettura in Venice (May 2018). She is co-editor of several books including Architecture and Representation: The Arab City (2016).

Episode 10

Alla Vronskaya is the Professor of the History of Architecture and the Built Environment at Kassel University. Her research focuses on the history of theory of modern architecture and on the links between architecture and the sciences, as well as on the history of architecture in Russia and Eastern Europe. Originally from Russia, Vronskaya received her Ph.D. in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture and Art from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2014. She published and presented widely, including, most recently, book chapters in “Productive Universals – Specific Situations. Critical Engagement in Art, Architecture, Design and Urbanism” (Sternberg Press, 2019) and Alternative Postmodernisms (Bloomsbury, 2019), and is currently an area editor for the former Soviet Union in “Bloomsbury Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture”. Her forthcoming book “Architecture of Life: Soviet Interwar Modernism and the Human Sciences” explores the intersections between architecture, labor management, and human sciences in modern Russia.

Tuesday Night Live is a event series by the chair of Architecture Theory and Science at the faculty of Architecture (@fb15architektur) at Technical University of Darmstadt, supported by the Sto-Stiftung (@stostiftung). Design by Moritz Ebeling