Symposium: Architecture and Decentralization
When and Where
Description
Architecture and Decentralization: Buildings, Landscapes, Visual Economies
Department of Art History Symposium
University of Toronto Faculty Club, 41 Willcocks Street
This international symposium examines architecture’s role in modern processes of spatial and economic dispersal. Architectural forms, from company towns and corporate headquarters to highways and hydroelectric plants, have been key participants in industrial and post-industrial transformations of the environment. New visual languages have both articulated these reconfigurations and helped shape them. As economic power has migrated beyond traditional centres, architecture and its representations have constructed authority while simultaneously scattering it across networks. Speakers will explore these architectural expressions of modernization through case studies in North America, Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and postcolonial Africa.
Convened by Stéphane Gaessler (Postdoctoral Fellow) and Joseph Clarke (Associate Professor) and made possible by the University of Toronto–France Art History Partnership and the University of Toronto School of Cities.
Schedule
| 10:00 AM | Registration and welcome |
| 10:45 AM | Panel 1: Jean-Baptiste Minnaert (Sorbonne Université), chair |
| Jessica Mace (University of Toronto), “Decentralizing by Design: Printed Media and the Architecture of Canadian Company Towns” | |
| Joseph Clarke (University of Toronto), “Team Building: Collaboration and Control in the Postwar Knowledge Workplace” | |
| Katrin Zavgorodny-Freedman (McGill University), “Theorising Spatial Distributions of International Project Work at Erickson/Massey and Arthur Erickson Architects, 1963–1992” | |
| 12:45 PM | Lunch |
| 2:00 PM | Panel 2: Richard Sommer (University of Toronto), chair |
| Claire Zimmerman (University of Toronto), “Infra-spatial Considerations: Highway Construction from Detroit to Beyond” | |
| Łukasz Stanek (University of Michigan), “Bartering Architecture: State-Socialist Building Export in the Late Cold War” | |
| Stéphane Gaessler (University of Toronto), “Tracing the Forms of Metropolization: Hans Blumenfeld, Urban Planner from Moscow to Toronto” | |
| 4:00 PM | Closing reception |
