A vibrant research culture of inquiry and investigation runs through ESALA’s various subject areas. Our seminar series supports this by bringing scholars engaged in important research to ESALA in order to present their work and discuss it with the school community.
Recognising the rich interdisciplinarity of research interests across ESALA, the series welcomes speakers from a wide range of fields. Recent presentations range across topics that include: the etchings of Alexander Brodsky; the geological turn in contemporary art and philosophy; site-specific robotic fabrication; building materials and national identities; the urban photography of Thomas Struth; architectural globalisation in the late Cold War; time, space and the infrastructure of high-frequency trading; underwater architectures; the neoliberal baroque; and cinema and boredom.
Previous seminar series
2019/20 seminars
Wed 25 Sep 2019 | Dr Moa Carlsson, ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art | ‘The Data Gaze: Design, Automation, and Politics of Aesthetics in Postwar Britain’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 2 Oct 2019 | Luke Pearson, Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL | ‘Toward a Videogame Urbanism’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 9 Oct 2019 | Dr Ray Lucas, University of Manchester | ‘Drawing Parallels: Knowledge Production in Axonometric, Isometric and Oblique Drawings’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Fri 11 Oct 2019 | Sam Barclay, Case Design, Mumbai | ‘The House to Collect Water’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1-2pm
Wed 16 Oct 2019 | Killian Doherty, ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art | ‘Extracts from a West African Utopia’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 23 Oct 2019 | Professor Adam Sharr and Dr Sam Austin, Newcastle University | ‘The University of Non-Stop Society’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 30 Oct 2019 | Laura Harty, ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art | ‘Butter Paper: Drawings Under the Surface’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 6 Nov 2019 | Elizabeth Deans Romariz, University of York | ‘Architects’ Books’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 13 Nov 2019 | Dr David Cunningham, University of Westminster | ‘Planetary Urbanisation and the Problem of Form: from Marx to Aureli’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 20 Nov 2019 | Simone Ferracina, ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art | ‘Towards a Glossary of Exaptive Design' | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
Wed 27 Nov 2019 | Dr Nicholas Boyarsky, Oxford Brookes University / RMIT | ‘Bogdan Bogdanovich’s Mostar Partisans Necropolis’ | Adam House Lecture Theatre | 1pm - 2pm
2018/19
19 Sep 2018 | Ventilating Politics and The Politics of Ventilation, Henrik Schoenefeldt | Elliot Room, Minto House, Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
25 Sep 2018 | Harun Farocki on Technical and Virtual Images, Adam Jasper | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
3 Oct 2018 | Making Streamlines, Vortices and Plumes: Environmental Model Prototypes, Lisa Moffitt | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
10 Oct 2018 | Order & Disorder in Urban Spatial Form, Harry Smith | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
17 Oct 2018 | Worlding the Factory: A case study from Ahmedabad, Gujarat, 1948-2018, Megha Chand Inglis | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
24 Oct 2018 | Legislative Architectures - Instituting Art, Law and Property, Lucy Finchett-Maddock | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
31 Oct 2018 | Thermal Performances: A method for interrogating the technical in architecture, Claudia Dutson | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
7 Nov 2018 | Is Architecture Turning Toward Production?, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Nick Beech & Tilo Amhof | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
14 Nov 2018 | Crowd to Cloud and Contract to Commons: Curating Control, Anne Bottomley | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
21 Nov 2018 | Crafting History: Archiving and the quest for architectural legacy, Albena Yaneva | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
28 Nov 2018 | Precision in Architectural Production: A 7-page specification for an unfinished ceiling, Mhairi Mcvicar | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
5 Dec 2018 | The Work of the Architect In Self-Managed Industrialisation, Tijana Stevanovic | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm - 2pm
23 Jan 2019 | Curating Derive (Geddes Visiting Fellow Seminar), Tina Di Carlo | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
30 Jan 2019 | Sketching Practice (Geddes Visiting Fellow Seminar), Tina Di Carlo | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
6 Feb 2019 | Writing in Space: Curatorial exercises in architectural drawing, Sophia Banou | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
13 Feb 2019 | Light Passes: Thinking the architectural exhibition geologically, Tiago Torres Campos | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
27 Feb 2019 | Objects and fields (George Simpson Visiting Professor Seminar), Stan Allen | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
28 Feb 2019 | Exhibiting Brutalism: Raw architecture in an untamed world, Ben Highmore | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
5 March 2019 | Space in photographs: A renaissance cure for present-day ills, Frank Doring | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 6:45pm - 7:45pm
6 March 2019 | Strange Bedfellows: An exhibition and its catalogue, Wallis Miller | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
13 March 2019 | Photographs of photographs: Disruptions and juxtapositions at the Miles Van Der Rohe Exhibition at Moma (1947 - 48), Catalina Mejia Moreno | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
20 March 2019 | Editing Inventions (Geddes Visiting Fellow Seminar), Tina Di Carlo | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
27 March 2019 | Fashioning the idle gaze (Geddes Visiting Fellow Seminar), Nicholas De Monchaux | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
3 April 2019 | Exhibiting on the surface, Mark Dorrian | Adam House Lecture Theatre, 3 Chambers Street | 1pm
2017/2018
20 Sep | Liam Ross | Spectres of Edo Castle: Fire safety and "enforced cosmopolitanism" in Tokyo
27 Sep | Aikaterini Antonopoulou | The Online Presence of Golden Dawn and the Athenian Realities It Brings Forward
2 Oct | Richard Weller | Landscape Works
4 Oct | Mark Dorrian | On Michael Webb's Sin Centre and the Drawing of Mobility
11 Oct | Ana Bonet Miro | On Playgrounds and the Archive: Joan Littlewood’s Stratford Fair, 1967-1975
18 Oct | Catherine Ingraham | Place (rule) vs Space (actions)
25 Oct | Cristina Nan | Digital Ecologies and the Posthuman
1 Nov | Giorgio Ponzo | Architecture without End
15 Nov | Margaret Stewart and Peter Hagis | Animating architecture - an experiment in accessibility?
16 Nov | David Turnbull | Six images - six questions and one project"
22 Nov | Michael Webb | In conversation
29 Nov | Tahl Kaminer | Planning Appeals, Clandestine Policy Making, and Student Housing
6 Dec | Ella Chmielewska | Cover Stories: Blind Spots in Theory
2016/2017
28 September | Douglas Spencer | Affect and Individuation: Architecture and Experience in the Culture of Neoliberalism
5 October | Adam Bobbette | Cultures of Forecasting, Nature, and the Uncertainty of the Future
12 October | Glyn Davis | Waiting for something to happen: cinema and endurance
19 October | Isabelle Doucet | Architecture and Resistance: Within or against?
26 October | Anthony Auerbach | Reading Material: inscription, erasure, reconnaissance
2 November | Pablo Martinez | Andrea Branzi and the "Città senza Architettura": From the No-Stop City to Weak Urbanization Models
9 November | Linda Matthews | Pixel Versus Line: From the Digital Image to the Architectural Surface
16 November | Philip Goad | Marks on the Land, Crossing Currents: Identity and Australian Architecture
18 January | Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos | Spatial Justice: the violence of space
25 January | Nick Dunn | Dark Futures: the loss of night in the contemporary city?
1 February | Nat Chard | Devices of Indeterminacy
15 February | Stephen Graham | Vertical noir: Histories of the future in urban science fiction
16 February | Wang Shu | Lu Wenyu | In conversation
1 March | Sukanya Krishnamurthy | Public spaces and urban collective cultures
15 March | Andrew Herscher | Black and Blight
22 March | Luis Callejas | Title tbc
24 March | Tina Di Carlo | Exhibiting Architecture
29 March | Marc Schoonderbeek | Architectural Adjacencies: the dérive, mapping and 2.5D
5 April | Peter Salter | Walmer Yard: Housing
6 April | Maria Theodorou | The Enchantment of Things: Architects (dis)engagement with Space
3 May | Hugo Hinsley | Title tbc
10 May | Niall Hobhouse | Collections: Buildings and Drawings
2015/2016
Emily Brady | The Natural Sublime and the Self
Tom Weaver | This Has Killed That
Monika Bakke | Geologizing With Art: How to make kin among mineral species
Guan Lee | Clay Robotics at Grymsdke Farm
Aliki Economides | On Collective Memory and its Edification
Barry Bergdoll | Reading Mile High: Frank Lloyd Wright takes on Chicago, Co-hosted with the Architectural History and Theory Seminar Series
Francesca Hughes | The Architecture of Error: Matter, Measure, and the Misadventures of Precision
Robin Wilson | Generic expectations and intermediary space: a reflexive architectural photography
Adrian Forty | On Nations and Materials: a nineteenth-century question revisited in the twenty-first century
Stefano Corbo | Archaeology of Infrastructures: a conceptual cartography
David Sorfa | Touch and History: The Body in Czech Phenomenology and 1960s Cinema
Hugh Campbell | Unconscious Places: Thomas Struth and the Architecture of the City
Lorens Holm | The City is a Thinking Machine - Or What We Might Call Spatial Consciousness
Dilip Da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur | Where does Design begin?
Mark West | The Control Question
Peg Rawes | Architectural Ecologies and Ratios
Simona Salvo | After the Ordeal: The Pirelli Tower in Milan and the conservation of metal and glass curtain walls
Katja Grillner | Enacting the Past, the Distant (or What is Not Here, But There): Performing Material Fictions (2013-2015)
Samantha Hardingham | Cedric Price Works - 1952-2003: A Forward-Minded Retrospective
Phillip Meuser | Seismic Modernism: Architecture and Housing in Soviet Tashkent
Jonathan Hill | A Landscape of Architecture, History and Fiction
Esther Leslie | Those in Glass Houses
2014/2015
Assemble Architects | Work in Progress
Nic Beech | Stuart Hall and the New Left: rethinking and reworking the metropole in the mid-1950s
Mark Dudek | Play Architecture
Harry Smith | Planning Issues
Film screening | How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster?
Johanna Blocker | The Reconstruction of Architectural Monuments and Historic Townscapes
Fiona McLachlan | Colour and Contingency: Theory into Practice
David Cunningham | Architecture, Modernity and Acceleration(ism)
Stavros Stavides | On Urban Commoning: The City Shapes Institutions of Sharing
Tim Ingold | Knots and Joints …. / Atmosphere
Thomas Oles | Better: Toward a History of Dangerous Idea
Łukasz Stanek | Architectural Globalization in the Late Cold War: From Socialist Poland to Kuwait and Back
Stephen Walker | The Architecture of the Travelling Street Fair: Assembly, Apparatus, and a Guidebook
Perry Kulper | Madness in the Methods
Donald Mackenzie | History, Materiality, Morals: 'Futures Lag' in high-frequency trading
William Firebrace | Memo for Nemo
Katie Lloyd Thomas | The New Synthesist, Proprietary Specification, Ripolin and Elizabeth Benjamin’s East Wall
Paul Jones | Imagining Capitalist Futures: the architectural modelling of an urban development
Jonathan Mills | Revisiting the Memory Theatre of Giulio Camillo - a proposal for an installation
Robin Moore | Interdisciplinary, evidence-based design education: reflecting on decades of ‘Human Use of the Urban Landscape’
Yue Zhuang | Liberty, Fear and the City of Sensations: Sir William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (1772)
David Cunningham | Architecture, modernity and the idea of socialism
