Guest Lecture Series: Edward Dimendberg (NOTE: VENUE CHANGE)

PLEASE NOTE: Due to an unforseen circumstance with the original venue, this lecture will now be held in SS2110 (Sidney Smith Hall). Thank-you for your understanding.

During a productive career that spanned four decades, the polymathic German artist and filmmaker Harun Farocki (1944-2014) created essay films, television programs, documentaries, and art installations, and wrote theoretical texts and criticism. Although today best known for his investigations of war, photography, the visual arts, Farocki had a lifelong interest in the built environment and his late work includes four documentaries on the design process. The Creators of Shopping Worlds (2001) presents an architectural competition for a shopping mall and the study of consumer behavior. In Comparison (2009) explores the social relations and technologies of brick production in six countries. A New Product (2012) follows the deliberations of consultants engaged in planning an office complex whose public spaces blur distinctions between work and private life. Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (2013) shows the principals of an architecture studio known for its polychromatic buildings as they develop credible solutions and appease difficult clients. Throughout this cinematic “quartet,” Farocki employs the formal attitude  of “direct cinema” in which the dialectical investigations and essay films of his earlier career give way to a neutral and invisible style. This late shift responds to the imperatives of a different conjuncture where technology has the potential to further marginalize architects in a world in which 90% of all buildings already are realized without them.

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Bio:

Edward Dimendberg is a historian of architecture and urbanism and Professor of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.  He also has taught at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His books include Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity and (Harvard, 2004) and Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images. (Chicago, 2013). Recently, the Getty Research Institute published his critical edition of Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Structure of the City of Two Million in Southern California by the German geographer Anton Wagner and the sourcebook Richard Neutra and the Making of the Lovell Health House, 1925-35. He frequently writes on architecture in the United States for Bauwelt and his research has been supported by fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Getty Research Institute, and the American Academy in Berlin. He currently is writing a book about documentary films on architecture.