EDAR Newsletter #92

October 2024

Public Thesis Defenses

Mikhael Johanes (PhD student at LDM)

18 October 2024, 17:00 (CET)

The public defense of the doctoral thesis entitled "Machine Understanding of Architectural Space: From Analytical to Generative Applications" will be held in BC 117 (campus EPFL Ecublens). The thesis is completed under the supervision of Prof. Jeffrey Huang (LDM). To attend the public defense, please contact here.

Anne-Marlene Rüede (PhD student at LASTRO)

12 November 2024, 17:00 (CET)

The public defense of the doctoral thesis entitled "Connecting Space Logistics and Architecture – A Pattern Language for Robust Mission" will be held in AAC 132 (campus EPFL Ecublens). The thesis is completed under the supervision of Prof. Jean-Paul Kneib (LASTRO) and Prof. Jeffrey Huang (LDM). To attend the public defense, please contact here.

EDOC and EDAR New PhD Students Meetings

For New PhD students who have just joined or will be joining the EDAR Doctoral Program, two welcome meetings cannot be missed.

On November 4, EDOC will organise a PhD Welcome event open to all first-year PhD candidates at EPFL. The event will commence at 15:30 at the Rolex Learning Center. For details and registration, please visit the link.

On November 5, EDAR cordially invites the new PhD students to a welcome session at 14:30, in the room BP 3127. The session will begin with a presentation by Melchior Allen, HR Manager of the ENAC faculty, on the different HR aspects of the PhD status. The session will be then the opportunity to get to know the program and obtain answers to all related questions, benefitting from the participation of Elena Cogato Lanza, Program Director, Sandra Bottà, Administrator, and QUATRE, the PhD students' representative collective. The new PhD students are kindly asked to confirm their participation by replying to an invitation email sent by Sandra Bottà.

SAVE THE DATE

2024 Research and Doctoral Awards Ceremony

The Vice Presidency for Postgraduate Education and the EDAR Doctoral School have a great pleasure to invite you to the upcoming Research and Doctoral Awards Ceremony taking place on Thursday, November 28, 2024, in the Forum Rolex from 17:00. For detailed programme, please visit the link.

ENAC Series of Workshops for PhD Students

The ENAC Dean's office is offering a series of workshops, entitled Being a PhD – Doctoral Student in Architecture, in response to the Social Climate Survey at the Institute of Architecture and related themes, that was carried out in 2023. These workshops are free and open to the ENAC community. The next workshop will take place on October 31 at 13:00 in AAC 006. The full program of the series is available through the following link. To learn more about ENAC's organisational culture, please visit the link.

EDAR General Schedule

Fall 2024

EDAR has set up a general schedule encompassing all doctoral courses and other events and activities organised by the doctoral program in 2024 Fall semester. The schedule is available through the following link. For detailed information on individual courses, please consult with the EDAR Course book by visiting the link.

To view the full database of external doctoral courses, please visit the link. In order to have the external courses counted towards the requirements of the EDAR program, please consult with Sandra Bottà in all cases.

AR-683 – MUD ON THE FLOOR

Construction Drawing – Lecture by Jesse Honsa

The public lecture series Mud on the Floor. Dirty Realities in Scholarly Work will be opened with a talk by Jesse Honsa (KU Leuven). Entitled Construction Drawing: Retracing the Roles of an Early 20th Century British Contractor, it will introduce drawing as an investigative tool, focused on the case of one building firm: John Laing & Son, a large-scale builder of garden cities and settlements in the early 20th century. The lecture will take place on October 16 at 12:30 in AAC 014. For detailed announcement, please visit the link.

AR-681 – SPACE, LIFE, AND POLITICS

7th Bernardo Secchi Working Seminar 2024

Marking Bernardo Secchi’s 10th memorial anniversary, the 2024 Bernardo Secchi Working Seminar, organised by Habitat Research Center (HRC), extends the reflection initiated in 2022, delving into concerns such as socio-spatial conflicts, strategies for mitigating climate change, counteracting its impacts, and the emergence of new ecologies in modern urbanised regions. It is organised into three main thematic axes: concrete utopias, counter-actions and activism, and radical policies. The seminar will take place on October 28 and 29 at Foyer SG and online. For further details, please visit the link.

ETHZ LUS Course

More-Than Methodologies

The Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies (LUS) at ETHZ organises a doctoral seminar entitled More-Than Methodologies: Explorations in Landscape and Urban Research. The seminar explores innovating and qualitative methodologies that go beyond traditional approaches in landscape and urban research by emphasising mobile, embodied, participatory, and artistic methods and tackling pressing themes, such as pluriversal contact zones, more-than-human landscapes, and critical plant studies. The seminar runs between September and December 2024 and is organised by Dr. Nazlı Tümerdem. For more information, please visit the link.

EXHIBITION

Spatial Convers(i)or

EDAR is happy to share the announcement of the exhibition curated by EDAR's alumna Denise Bertschi, which recently opened at CAN Centre d'art Neuchâtel. Entitled SPATIAL CONVERS(I)OR, the exhibition highlights the colonial past of Switzerland and Neuchâtel, and the plural histories linked to it, particularly related to the Bahia region in Brazil. The exhibition is also a way to engage in conversation with Brazilian artists about the entangled past, with multiple performances and roundtable discussions planned within its span. For detailed information, please visit the link.

CALLS

Call for Postdoctoral Positions

The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry at Emory University, United States, is pleased to open applications for four one-year postdoctoral research fellowships. Applications are invited from candidates from any humanistic discipline who are eager to be part of a community of scholars engaged in innovative and interdisciplinary research and conversations around the 2025-26 theme, Life/Story. It is envisioned that fellows may pursue research employing a range of historical, contemporary, social, cultural, artistic, and philosophical approaches to capturing a life, including but not limited to oral and archival histories, ethnography, philosophy, creative writing and film. Applications are accepted until December 9, 2024. For detailed information, please visit the link.

Calls for Papers and Participation

The program in History, Theory, and Criticism (HTC) at the MIT School of Architecture + Planning announces a call for papers for the 2025 HTC Graduate Colloquium, entitled Uncertainty. The colloquium will collaboratively probe the contours of historical knowability and attend to yet unmade futures in and across the disciplines of architecture, art, design, urbanism, and allied fields. Uncertainty offers space for reimagination, for creatively rethinking the future of our disciplines – an urgent endeavour considering compounding pressures of unfolding environmental and humanitarian crises in addition to increased scrutiny of the “value” of the humanities in university education. The colloquium will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on March 14-15, 2025. Abstracts of 300 words and CV should be submitted to htc.uncertainty@gmail.com before October 25, 2024. For detailed information, please visit the link.

The Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) announces Method Acts, an annual series showcasing innovative research methods used by emerging scholars in architectural history and adjacent fields. The series, which will be held in February and March 2025, will confront questions of methodology head-on and consider how our interpretive frameworks might expand architectural historiography and its disciplinary boundaries. Submissions are encouraged from scholars implementing alternative and “nontraditional” methods in their work and methods that reconsider traditional disciplinary boundaries and narratives. Applicants are expected via the following link before November 25, 2024. For detailed information, please visit the link.

The Journal of Design History announces a call for papers for its new issue, entitled Designing for Disability Futures. The issue addresses the ways in which design has critically intervened in shaping distinct futures for disabled individuals and communities. Contributions might discuss disability futures by examining how design mediates different bodily experiences and relationships and negotiates social norms and forms of assembly. Abstracts should be submitted to igalan@barnard.edu and dserlin@ucsd.edu before December 1, 2024. For detailed information, please visit the link.