saai lecture

saai lecture with Ines Weizman and Launch Egon Eiermann Digital - Wednesday, November 08, 2023, 19:00

With the introduction of the saai Lectures, an annual lecture with international guests, the Archive for Architecture and Engineering (saai) is actively involved in the discourse on the built environment as a dynamic place of knowledge. Archives are the foundation of a sustainable future, the basis for the reappraisal of social heritage and a generator for ever better questions.

Our guest is Ines Weizman with the lecture "Fevering Archives: Records, Documents and Their Annotations". Ines Weizman is a member of the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA), Professor of Architectural Theory and Design at the Academy of Fine Arts, Institute for Art and Architecture in Vienna, and Head of the PhD Program in Architecture at the Royal College of Art.

In her lecture, she will examine a series of encounters with architectural archives that deal with the more than hundred-year history of architectural modernism. Prof. Weizman will show how documents, photographs and even material samples can be understood at a molecular level of history. Collecting and archiving is always linked to an obsession with searching, researching and collecting, catalyzed by a certain craving that some refer to as "archive mania" or "archive fever". However, "Fevering Archives" also aims to counter the idea that archives are bound to a place or a system of organization. Rather, archives are dynamic systems whose records must be constantly reviewed, updated, networked, rewritten and relabeled. The lecture will therefore conclude with feminist and queer experimental practices that question the conventional coordinates along which objects and architecture are defined.

As part of the event, the digital catalog of Egon Eiermann's work will be presented and made available to the public. The project "Egon Eiermann digital" could be realized thanks to the generous support of the Egon Eiermann Gesellschaft.

KIT, South Campus
Building 20.40, Egon Eiermann Lecture Hall
Kaiserstrasse 12
76131 Karlsruhe