Modern architecture, with the 茅migr茅 architect as its messenger, sought to create a world in which buildings performed an act of global dissemination. They were to exist in a universal space where site specificity was no longer a value and authorship no longer central. A protagonist 鈥榦n the move鈥, a homeless modernist perhaps, challenges the very essence of place-bound nationalist politics. The experience of exile, dislocation, or disarticulation is deeply inscribed in the aesthetic structure of modernism, challenging the site, appearance and meaning of the architectural object. Consequently, historians of modernism are challenged to narrate and follow the trajectories of migration, trying to piece together routes as artefacts keep on popping up in unexpected places.
This talk looks at the migration of ideas through different means and media: writings, architectural drawings, photographs, films, artifacts, building materials and buildings themselves, but also their protagonists 鈥 authors, owners and inhabitants. In a series of archival close-ups it will present research on collaborators of Adolf Loos, who had worked and studied with him in Vienna and Prague, and who in the 1930s, brought his design principles to Palestine. This research does not only add to an already well-established scholarship about Adolf Loos, but tries to make a series of methodological and theoretical points about threads and traces that pose the most potent questions for the architectural historian as she traces the complex experience of modernity through exile.
Ines Weizman is professor of architecture theory, director of the Bauhaus-Institute of History and Theory of Architecture and Planning and director of the Centre for Documentary Architecture at the Bauhaus-Universit盲t Weimar. She trained as an architect at the Bauhaus-Universit盲t Weimar and the 脠cole d鈥橝rchitecture de Belleville in Paris, the Sorbonne, the University of Cambridge, and the Architectural Association, where she completed her PhD thesis in History and Theory. In 2014, her edited book Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence, was published by Routledge. The book Before and After: Documenting the Architecture of Disaster, written together with Eyal Weizman was published in the same year by Strelka Press. In 2015 she edited with Jorge Otero-Pailos the issue 鈥楶reservation and Copyright鈥 for the journal Future Anterior听(University of Minnesota Press). Her articles have appeared in books, magazines and journals internationally. The installation听鈥溾楻epeat Yourself鈥: Loos, Law and the Culture of the Copy鈥听was shown as part of the 鈥淢useum of Copying鈥 (curated by FAT Architects) at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012, and in 2013 as solo-shows in the Architecture Centre Vienna and the Buell Architecture Gallery at Columbia University, New York.听Earlier research and exhibition projects include 鈥Celltexts. Books and other works produced in prison鈥 (together with Eyal Weizman), first exhibited in Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turino (2008, 2009, 2014, 2015). In 2016 she directed the International Bauhaus-Colloquium titled 鈥顿耻蝉迟&补尘辫;顿补迟补鈥 at the Bauhaus-Universit盲t Weimar.