This event brings together several contributors to the recently published book Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art and Architecture who will each present their research, followed by a moderated panel discussion. Speakers will consider the ways in which multiple stages, phases, or periods in an artistic or design process have served to arrive at the final artefact, with a focus on the meaning and use of the iteration. Key questions surround the roles of writing, the use of media, and relationships between object, image, and reproduction. Architecture and objects will be interrogated as unique yet mutable works by examining their antecedents, successive exemplars, and their afterlives – and thus their role as organizers or repositories of meaning. How can a closer look at iteration reveal new perspectives into the production of objects and the production of thought alike?
Organised by Dr Robin Schuldenfrei (The Courtauld)
Professor Zeynep Celik Alexander is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She specializes in the history of architecture in the modern period. Çelik Alexander is the author of Kinaesthetic Knowing: Aesthetics, Epistemology, Modern Design (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2017) and co-editor, with John May, of Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020). She is a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, an editor of the journal Grey Room, and a co-director of Columbia’s Center for Comparative Media. She is currently at work on new book on Victorian databases.
Professor Peter Christensen is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Rochester. His specialization is modern architectural and environmental history, particularly of Germany, Central Europe and the Middle East. His theoretical interests center on issues of geopolitics and multiculturalism. He is the author of the book, Germany and the Ottoman Railway Network: Art, Empire, and Infrastructure (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), winner of the 2020 Alice Davis Hitchcock Award from the Society of Architectural Historians for the most distinguished work of scholarship in the history of architecture by a North American scholar. He is also the author of the forthcoming book Materialized: German Steel in Global Ecology, from Penn State Press. Peter received his PhD from Harvard University. Peter has served as Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter at the Technische Universität München (2012-2014) and Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art (2005-2008). Peter holds a professional Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, a Master of Design Studies in the History and Theory of Architecture, with distinction, and a Master of Arts, both from Harvard. Peter is the recipient of the Philip Johnson Book Award (2010) from the Society of Architectural Historians and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Fulbright Foundation, the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, the Society of Architectural Historians, and the Historians of Islamic Art Association, among others.
Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Professor of Art History at University College Dublin. She has published extensively on the history of modern German architecture, and is currently working with Bryan Clark Green on a book on the Belgian Friendship Building on the campus of Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia. James-Chakraborty’s books include Architecture since 1400 (Minnesota, 2014) and Modernism as Memory: Building Identity in the Federal Republic of Germany (2018) as well as the edited collections Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the Cold War (Minnesota, 2006) and India in Art in Ireland (Routledge, 2016).
Professor Peter Sealy is an architectural historian who studies the ways in which architects constructively engage with reality through indexical media such as photography. He holds architecture degrees from the McGill University School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was a Frank Knox fellow. He recently completed his PhD at Harvard on the emergence of a photographic visual regime in nineteenth-century architectural publications, seen through the lens of truth — in both architecture and its representations.
Peter’s research on Émile Zola and the immateriality of 19th century iron buildings was recently published in Function and Fantasy: Iron Architecture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Routledge), a volume he co-edited with Paul Dobraszczyk. His articles have appeared in Abitare, Border Crossings, Canadian Architect, Domus, Harvard Design Magazine, The Journal of Architecture, and Oris, and in several edited volumes, including Blackwell’s Companion to the History of Architecture. Recently, he studied the resurgence of model photography and photomontage in contemporary architectural representation as a Mellon Researcher at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Current research projects include a study of the Berlin Wall in film, and of classicism’s persistent recurrence as the architecture of enslavement.
Dr. Robin Schuldenfrei is the Katja and Nicolai Tangen Senior Lecturer in 20th Century Modernism at The Courtauld. She has written widely on modernism as it intersects with theories of the object, architecture and interiors. Her publications include Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900-1933 (Princeton University Press, 2018) as well as numerous articles, essays, and the edited volumes: Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art and Architecture (2020), Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture (2012) and, co-edited with Jeffrey Saletnik, Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism (2009).