Talks and roundtable discussion

with Andreas Angelidakis, Léa-Catherine Szacka and Véronique Patteeuw moderation by Dirk van den Heuvel

The work of Andreas Angelidakis emerges from collages of imagined or digital images devoid of any spatial quality or design. He presents us with virtual dream houses and buildings, which inhabit networked environments. Drawing on notions such as the ruin-as-trope, the accumulation and supremacy of the image, the alternation between two-and three dimensional worlds, the existing landscape as something to be learned from, and the suspicion of heroic modernist architecture, Angelidakis’ work prompts us to inquire into the contemporary relevance of the postmodern: an international movement that developed in the late 1970s in response to the flattening of cultural, economic and power structures, and now seems to have re-emerged in different form within the digital age.

Through a series of short presentations of 20 minutes, followed by a roundtable discussion, we will ask a range of related questions: How have different media offered an alternative to the building site, allowing the architect to experiment beyond the traditional boundaries of the profession? How can we understand the resurfacing of postmodern strategies in the age of the Internet and social media – its subjects caught in the logic of browsing, scrolling, clicking, and copy-pasting? How is the revival or “continuing challenge” of postmodernism intertwined with the desire for a more humane environment – a desire we have witnessed, for example, in the anthropomorphized buildings of Madelon Vriesendorp, but which also clearly emanates from the more recent work of Andreas Angelidakis? And finally, to put it in architect Sam Jacob’s words, how could Postmodernism’s ghost fulfill its destiny more fully than it ever could in its original form?

This public programme is the concluding event of I used to build my feelings, now I watch them leave, a selection of works by Andreas Angelidakis.

Short presentations and roundtable discussion

16:00: short introduction
16:10: Andreas Angelidakis (artist and architect, Athens)
16:30: Léa-Catherine Szacka (architecture professor, University of Manchester) and Véronique Patteeuw (architecture professor, Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et du Paysage Lille)
17:10: short break
17:30: Roundtable moderated by Dirk van den Heuvel (architecture professor, TU Delft)

Biographies

Andreas Angelidakis was born in Athens in 1968. He studied Architecture at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and was trained as an architect at Columbia University in New York where he graduated in 1995. Recent solo exhibitions include Soft Ruin in ALT Art Space, Istanbul (2016) in which the artist pondered over simulated ruins immune to decay, 1:1 Period Rooms at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (2015), an installation using period rooms from the collection of the Amsterdam Museum, and Every End is a Beginning, the artist’s 2014 retrospective at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (EMST). In 2017 he participated in the documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel with a series of works including Unauthorized, and Demos, a collection of modules which served as seating during the Parliament of Bodies. In 2015 he participated in the first edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial with a series of bibelots, and in 2014 he made the Preliminary Statement for the 8th Berlin Biennial in KW with CrashPad, a multi-purpose room with a library drawing upon the idea of the nineteenth-century salon. He has curated exhibitions including Fin de Siècle at the Swiss Institute in New York (2014), an eclectic and theatrical show including 43 iconic chairs, and The System of Objects, DESTE Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens (2013), inspired by Jean Baudrillard’s seminal 1968 book.

Léa-Catherine Szacka is a Lecturer in Architectural Studies at Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARg), the University of Manchester. Her work focuses on the history of architecture exhibitions, the history and theory of postmodern architecture, and, more broadly, the relationship between media and architecture since the 1970s. She has investigates these topics through extensive historical and archival research and using oral history and micro-history as methodological tools. Léa-Catherine received a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London in 2011. Léa-Catherine has lectured and published widely on postmodern architecture and has acted as editor, with Charles Jencks and Eva Branscome, for the 2011 re-edition of The Post-modern Reader. An important output of Léa-Catherine’s research on postmodern architecture is the recently published monograph Exhibiting the Postmodern: the 1980 Venice Architecture Biennale (Marsilio, 2016). More recently, Léa-Catherine has explored the role of media on the development of postmodern architecture when co-charing, together with Véronique Patteeuw, two international conference sessions (EAHN 2014 and SAH 2014) and co-editing (with Patteeuw) the volume Mediating Messages: On the Role of Exhibitions and Periodicals in Critically Shaping Postmodern Architecture (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2018).

Véronique Patteeuw (PhD) is associate professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et du Paysage Lille and editor of OASE, Journal for Architecture. Her research focuses on the theory and history of architectural publications, mostly intersecting with the history of postmodernism. From 2001 to 2010, she directed architectural publications for the Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam and co-curated in 2006 the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. Currently she is co-editing – with Léa-Catherine Szacka – Mediating Messages, a publication on the role of media in shaping postmodern architecture (Bloomsbury, 2017) and developing architectural research for Studio SNCDA (Brussels).

Dirk van den Heuvel is an associate professor at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft. He is the co-founder and head of the Jaap Bakema Study Centre at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, the joint research initiative between TU Delft and Het Nieuwe Instituut. Van den Heuvel was curator of ‘Open: A Bakema Celebration’, the official presentation of the Dutch national pavilion for the 14th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale (2014). He is an editor of the publication series DASH. Delft Architectural Studies on Housing (nai010 publishers) as well as the online, open access journal for architectural theory Footprint. He was also an editor of the Dutch journal OASE (1993-1999). His publications include the books: Architecture and the Welfare State (Routledge 2015, with M. Swenarton and T. Avermaete), Team 10. In Search of a Utopia of the Present 1953-1981 (NAi Publishers 2005, with M. Risselada), Alison and Peter Smithson. From the House of the Future to a House of Today (010 Publishers 2004, with M. Risselada).