The Penelope: Purposive Architecture and the Cares of History

The Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning is pleased to present public lecture, 'Purposive Architecture and the Cares of History' with Claire Zimmerman.

At this historical moment and with increasing urgency, planetary and political crisis demand that humans act with careful intentions. Architectural historians have a particular charge: making sense of the forensic evidence that is left behind in buildings, environments, and their manifold archives in the face of an increasingly ahistorical present. The 2024 Penelope Lecture addresses purpose in the built environment from a decade of research into second-wave industrialisation and its buildings. 

My title alludes to the multiple purposes of architecture, not all of them authored by architects, and the related agency of the historian in recording, assessing, and presenting built environments to others. The lecture begins where I began, with the modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and a deeply historical work executed at the end of the architect’s life. It spans three recent historical projects that analyse contexts in which such modernism unfolded, contexts that were also deeply embedded in neocolonialism and empire. The first is a recently completed book that addresses the designed environments of US industry during its hyper industrialization of automobility, by architects Albert Kahn, Inc. of Detroit. The second and third are collective efforts: to analyse the technology exchange that spread industrial methods from the US to the USSR (bringing other ones back); and Architecture against Democracy, a book that returns to the political ramifications behind built environments in the modern period. 

These three investigations conducted at the intersections of technology and architecture underpin new work on the political economy of built environments, as I articulate some of the crucial tasks confronting architecture and its histories today.

When
Wednesday, August 14, 6:00pm - 7:00pm
Refreshments are available from 5:00pm
Location 
State Library of New South Wales, 1 Shakespeare Pl, Sydney NSW 2000

Bio
Claire Zimmerman is the author of Albert Kahn Inc.: Architecture, Labor, and Industry (MIT Press, 2024), the co-editor of Detroit-Moscow-Detroit: An Architecture for Industrialization (with Jean-Louis Cohen and Christina Crawford, MIT Press, 2023), and the co-editor of Architecture against Democracy: Histories of the Nationalist International (with Reinhold Martin, Minnesota 2024). A special journal number, The Costs of Architecture, focused on building costs and their importance in histories of the built environment (Grey Room 71 [2018], co-edited with L. Allais and Z. Çelik Alexander). 

Other recent work includes “Migration, Briefly Arrested,” in the Canadian Centre for Architecture web journal, “The Anti-Photograph,” in Modern Management Methods (ed. C. Blanchfield and F. Lotfi-Jam for Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2019), and “Built Environment” in The Art Institute of Chicago Field Guide to Photography and Media (A. Byrd and E. Siegel). Other books include Photographic Architecture in the Twentieth Century (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), Neo-avant-garde and Postmodern: Postwar Architecture in Britain and Beyond (co-edited with Mark Crinson, Yale Studies in British Art, 2010), and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe: The Structure of Space (Taschen, 2006). Zimmerman began teaching at the University of Toronto in 2023. 

She is currently working collaboratively on projects exploring architecture and property, architectural history and cost, and industrial architecture. She has helped conserve and will publish the forty-year scrapbook of Alison Smithson (with Tate Britain).

Image Credit:
Panorama of the Hudson Motor Car Company, November 23,1910. Ph.: Spooner & Wells. Albert Kahn Associates Records, Bentley Historical Library and Albert Kahn Associates.

The Penelope was generously established by University of Sydney Alumna, Penelope Seidler.

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