Karin Reisinger

Karin Reisinger is a postdoctoral researcher within Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm where she organizes the conference Architecture and Feminism: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies together with Hélène Frichot, and works on a collection of small-scale narratives of large-scale environmental transformations, based on methodologies of feminist political ecology and perceiving architectures as part of queer ecologies. After receiving architecture diploma from Vienna University of Technology she pursued cultural studies at the University of Vienna and completed her PhD at the Visual Culture Unit at Vienna University of Technology: Grass Without Roots_Towards Nature Becoming Spatial Practice which looks into alternative genealogies of nature preservation landscapes. Karin works as university lecturer at KTH School of Architecture in Stockholm and at Institute of Art and Design of Vienna UT, where she co-initiated the symposium In Transitional Landscapes (work reports), held 2015.

Dr Hélène Frichot::archandphil blog convener

Dr Hélène Frichot has recently taken up a new position as assistant professor in the School of Architecture and the Built Environment, KTH, Stockholm, in the Critical Studies stream. She has co-curated the Architecture+Philosophy public lecture series in Melbourne, Australia (http://architecture.testpattern.com.au) since 2005. Between 2004-2011 she held a academic position in the School of Architecture and Design, RMIT University. Her research examines the transdisciplinary field between architecture and philosophy (while her first discipline is architecture, she holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Sydney, 2004). Hélène draws predominantly on the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, alongside other poststructuralist, as well as feminist thinkers. Her published research has ranged widely from commentary on the ethico-aesthetics of contemporary digital architecture operating within the new biotechnological paradigm, to the role of emerging participatory and relational practices in the arts, including critical and creative spatial practices. She considers architecture-writing to be her mode of practice.

Dr Teresa Stoppani

Teresa Stoppani is Reader in Architecture at the University of Greenwich, and Visiting Professor in Architectural History and Theory at the University of Technology Sydney.

Her research focuses on re-readings of the city through unorthodox approaches to urbanism and architecture, and includes the book Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice. Discourses on architecture and the city (Routledge 2010). Recent writings include: considerations on Piranesi’s architectural space as open and dynamic, proposing ways of how this may engage with contemporary spatial practices (Footprint, 5, 2009); an exploration of the significance of dust in Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (The Journal of Architecture, 12:5, 2007), proposing reconsiderations on obsolescence and uncontrollable space; works on the map and the grid which reconsider space as apparently measured and ordered, but subject to new configurations (Architecture Research Quarterly, 12:3-4, 2009). Forthcoming publications include a study of the complex relation of architecture with the artificial disaster (in Space & Culture, ‘Spaces of Terror and Risk’, 2011), and an exploration of the connection between the material and the critical in architectural representation, through a study of lines and erasures in the graphic works of G. B. Piranesi (in I. Wingham (ed.), Mobility of the Line, Birkhauser, forthcoming).

Teresa will be contributing to the seminar, Architectural Violence and Creative Resistance during semester one, 2011. She will also be offering a lecture within the Architecture+Philosophy public lecture series, 6.30pm, 27 May, 2011. See http://architecture.testpattern.com.au/

ABSTRACT for Architecture+Philosophy public lecture, 27 May 2011

Teresa Stoppani

The Architecture of the Disaster

 This lecture considers the irruption of the designed destructive event in the order of the project of architecture. The artificial disaster brings onto architecture destructive sudden forces that operate against it with an intensity and a speed that are different from those that are at play in it. It imposes on architecture the man-devised, forceful and violent interference of a project that is alien to that of architecture. The violent orchestrated event in space is interpreted here as a paroxysmal – explicit, sudden, violent – actualization of the forces that contribute to the shaping of the environment. Design and planning are about space definition and form making, while the destruction inflicted by the disaster concerns the undoing of form, of planned orders, of structures (be they societal, urban, economic, national).

Through a series of examples, this lecture explores those practices which – in architecture and around architecture – work on and with the energy released by the disastrous event. It aims to understand the effects of the planned disaster on the wider questions that the discipline of architecture needs to ask, and suggests that silence – or, the project of silence of architecture – is an act of design too.