Nic Tummers (1928-2020)

Docomomo International wishes to convey the most sincere condolences at the passing of our friend, Nic Tummers, to his family and friends. “Nic Tummers (Heerlen, the Netherlands) sculptor, architectural critic and politician, has been of great importance for the establishment of Docomomo in the early days of our existence. Both as a Senator for the Labor Party in the Dutch Parliament (1974-1995) and as the chairman of the Culture and Education Committee in the Council of Europe (1979-1994) he was very active in promoting our young organization. He was a devoted Modernist, an innovative idealist and successful organizer of groundbreaking…

Call for Papers: Symposium: Remote Practices I: Architect’s tools and the Challenges of Globalization

Architects and critics use different tools to manifest the imagination of the otherwise distant and invisible, to design, describe and appraise future and past constructions in absentia. Beginning already in the ancient world, architecture was often practiced as an itinerant art – architects moving to the location of a building opportunity and consulting on projects away from home. In the fifteenth century, as architects like Leon Battista Alberti began working on drawings and models at a scholar’s table rather than the construction site, they expanded the possible distance between design and building. The printed word and image accompanied these developments…

Call for Papers: Visual Ethics after Communism

The Museum of the Romanian Peasant is seeking contributions for its annual journal Martor 26/2021, on the topic of Visual Ethics after Communism. Martor is a peer-reviewed academic journal, established in 1996, indexed by EBSCO, Index Copernicus, CEEOL, AIO, and MLA International Bibliography, with a focus on cultural and visual anthropology, ethnology and museology. This special issue to appear in 2021 will problematize the often-uncritical use of images in publications and displays about communism. This themed issue will pose a number of questions for anthropologists, historians, museologists and others. When does an image or a museum display present itself as problematic and for whom?…

Call for Papers: 74th Annual International Conference – Society of Architectural Historians

The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 74th Annual International Conference in Montréal, Canada, April 14–18, 2021. Please submit an abstract no later than 11:59 p.m. CDT on June 3, 2020, to one of the 33 thematic sessions, the Graduate Student Lightning Talks or the Open Sessions. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; scholars in related fields; and members of SAH chapters and partner organizations. Thematic sessions and Graduate Student Lightning Talks are listed below. The thematic sessions have been selected to cover topics across all time periods and architectural styles. If…

Call for Papers: Getty Research Journal, Fall 2021 Issue

Docomomo International is pleased to announce that the Getty Research Journal will begin biannual publication in 2021. Submissions are invited for the inaugural fall issue. Published twice a year, in February and in August, the journal will continue to feature the work of art historians, museum curators, and conservators around the world as part of the Getty’s mission to promote the presentation, conservation, and interpretation of the world’s artistic legacy. Articles are peer reviewed. We welcome submissions of original scholarship relevant to the Getty’s initiatives, research projects and themes, and collections. The Getty Research Journal is distributed in print and…

Docomomo Iran Newsletter

Docomomo International is glad to announce that Docomomo Iran published the first issue of its newsletter. Docomomo Iran Newsletter is in pdf format and will be published every month (based on Iranian solar calendar). The language of the newsletter is Persian and it consists of five sections: The Foreword, One Architect; One Building, An Adaptive Reuse Project, and News from the World. The newsletter can be downloaded from Docomomo Iran website. To read the full Newsletter click here.

Edmonton 2020 Conference: “Hindsight 2020: Conservation, Disruption, and the Future of Heritage” – virtual sessions | Covid-19 disclaimer

[Dear members and Supporters, The difficult decision by the boards of APT and the National Trust for Canada to switch the Edmonton 2020 conference to a virtual event set off two months of intense activity by the joint APT/NT/CAHP planning team. The team has worked hard to reimagine what our annual conference will be like online rather than in-person. First, we focused on modifying the program already developed for Edmonton, adapting it to a remote, digital format. Our goal is to make the content and social events as engaging and interactive as possible. Next we had to evaluate the technology needed to…

Guide to Architecture of the University City of 1952

Book review by Alejandrina Escudero The Guide to Architecture of the University City of 1952, published by the Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM, deals with one of the most notorious urban complexes of the 20th century in Mexico. Located to the south of Mexico City, on a bed of volcanic lava, its construction represented not only an architectural landmark but a true transformation of the educational community, influencing decisively the new generations of students and the country’s destiny. The University City was adjusted to master plan, by Mario Pani and Enrique del Moral,…

Instabilities and Potentialities. Notes on the Nature of Knowledge in Digital Architecture

Book review by Matthew Allen It is an odd book that begins by suggesting that we read another book, but there it is, in the fourth sentence: Georges Teyssot exhorting us to buy the recent translation of Gilbert Simondon’s early masterwork, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, originally published in French in 1958 (viii). Here we find in miniature the conundrum at the heart of what has been called “digital architecture” for the past thirty years: computational techniques have proliferated even as their original philosophical raison d’être has languished. As Mario Carpo argued in The Alphabet and the…

Carlo Scarpa. Casa Zentner a Zurigo: una villa italiana in Svizzera [Carlo Scarpa. Zentner house in Zurich: an Italian villa in Switzerland]

“The volume, published for Electaarchitecture, illustrates and documents the ‘micro-history’ of Casa Zentner in Zurich, the only building built by Carlo Scarpa outside Italy. Casa Zentner was conceived and built between 1963 and 1969 for Savina and René Zentner. Savina Rizzi, architecture superintendent and art collector, is among the most assiduous patrons of Carlo Scarpa since the 1950s. After following Frank Lloyd Wright’s project for the palace on the Grand Canal in Venice at a very young age, requested by the architect Angelo Masieri, her first husband who died prematurely, Savina will entrust Scarpa with various tasks including, in 1953-1954,…