EAHN Dublin 2016 Abstracts

European Architectural History Network / Fourth International Meeting Dublin/Ireland/ June 2-4 2016 EAHN 2016 Dublin ABSTRACTS THURSDAY: 2 JUNE 2016 FIRST PAPER SESSION SESSION: Architectures of Waiting in the City Henriette Steiner, University of Copenhagen Visual representations of contemporary urban milieus commonly suggest precise or uninterrupted activity. People move unhindered in and out of buildings and vehicles pass smoothly through the city. However, we must acknowledge that as everyday users of the city, our activities are often punctuated by intermissions, halts, interruptions and delays. In fact, a significant amount of our time in the city is spent doing very little— simply waiting. In contemporary culture, the places where we tend to wait are frequently pigeonholed as neutral or even unremarkable spaces; interstitial settings that are patently functional but devoid of wider consequences and meaning. Despite being a modality of participation in urban life, waiting or loitering is seen as a negative that contrasts with more active, goal-oriented activities. This session presents an opportunity to reappraise the significance of urban architectures of waiting. In doing so, it will also uncover how the phenomenon of waiting is fundamental to how we negotiate not just individual buildings or architectural settings but also the wider urban realm. More often than not, places of waiting are important thresholds, liminal spaces that communicate between two or more different locations or activities. The session proposes to explore the intricate relationship between waiting as an urban praxis—something people incontrovertibly do in the city—and the urban places or architectures of waiting that support it. It will thereby cast new light on a phenomenon that we know all too well, but whose significance an explicitly urban phenomenon remains unexplored. We seek innovative proposals that examine not only well-known typologies of the modern or contemporary city, such as airport departure lounges and the waiting rooms of railway or bus stations but also atypical or improvised settings that have, for one reason or another, become spaces of waiting—what, for instance, Jeremy Till refers to as ‘slack space’ (Architecture Depends, MIT Press, 2009). A case in point is the main entrance of Trinity College Dublin where a covered archway serves as a prominent and very public waiting space in the heart of the city. But the history of architecture provides a much larger body of material that deserves interpretation, and therefore we welcome proposals from broad chronological as well as geographical contexts. For example, papers might deal with one of the sophisticated places for waiting in a pre- or early-modern city, such as the colonnaded stoas that bordered the ancient Athenian Agora, or the loggia of the Ospedale degli Innocenti of Renaissance Florence. They may also equally consider something like the lobby and plaza of the modernist Seagram Building in New York City or the main entrance lobby of Adler and Sullivan’s Auditorium Building in Chicago or contemporary examples. What are you waiting for? Passing time in the Classical In other words, by reading between the lines Athenian Agora of ancient testimonia, we can begin to trace the ways by which civic spaces Samantha Martin-McAuliffe, accommodated, and even fostered, the act University College Dublin of waiting. “What has happened, Socrates, to make you This paper examines how one kind of leave your usual haunts in the Lyceum and building, the stoa, was a typical setting for pass your time here by the Stoa Basileios? waiting in Classical Athens. Stoas are Surely you are not prosecuting anyone essentially freestanding colonnaded halls, before the Archon Basileios as I am?” (Plato, and until now, research on these buildings in Euthyphro 2a). This opening exchange in the Athenian civic center, the Agora, has Plato’s Euthyphro is momentous because it focused on their role as discrete civic broadcasts Socrates’ indictment in charges monuments, such as trophy halls and key of impiety and the corruption of Athenian political offices, However, on a daily basis, youth. Yet this dialogue indirectly reveals stoas were equally likely to be places for other significant information that is routinely lingering, loitering and for pausing while en overlooked in modern scholarship: The route somewhere else. Belonging to no one identification of two architectural settings – exclusively, they inevitably became common the Lyceum and the Stoa Basileios – and to all. more specifically, the allusion to how Stoas play a supporting role in several Socrates occupied these particular places, dialogues and speeches that are set in the have the potential to enhance our Agora, often as locations of happenstance understanding of Classical Greek urbanism. encounters. In antiquity these buildings were so common as conversational settings and V.9 places for waiting or passing time that an Stop Motion. Slussen, ancient audience would have understood Stockholm their spatial characteristics implicitly. Yet it is precisely this typicality that makes such Tim Antsey, Oslo School of situations ripe for further study. Through a Architecture and Design/KTH School close re-reading of texts, and with the aid of of Architecture digital reconstructions, this paper shows how the Greek stoa was instrumental to the ways From its presentation as a futuristic solution civic space was perceived, shared and to the existing traffic chaos of 1920s Stockholm, Slussen, commissioned and structured in antiquity. Ultimately, it argues that the act of waiting in the Greek city was constructed between 1931 and 1935, was understood as something more than celebrated and denigrated for the extent to customary or casually presumed: rather than which it brought “modernist” car-bound city ‘merely happening’, it was considered a planning into the centre of a dense historical useful and intentionally planned aspect of urban fabric. urban order. Slussen is often understood as an evolutionary ancestor of the multi-lane high- speed traffic interchange (structures like the While You Walk: Waiting on the Santa Monica/San Diego Freeways Pavements circulatory that Reyner Banham would later Philip Schauss, The New School Love in Los Angeles). However although it may look like a monument to uninterrupted Sidewalks are various. There are the narrow flow, Slussen was conceived equally as a and somewhat uneven calçadas of the station – a point of hiatus between one kind backstreets of Lisbon, whose individual of journey and another. It housed three stones have painstakingly been hammered transport termini – for trams, trains and a into a bed of sand; along the far wider subway – and the apparatus was intended to streets of New York City there are often choreograph transitions between all of these large, rather old-looking slate slabs; and, by foot, as well as journeys by car, truck, more in keeping with the modern duty to barrow, bicycle boat and – not ensure safe passage, there are more generic unimportantly, lift. The design revolved very sidewalks, which consist of prefabricated, definitely around the experience of the modular paving stones or poured concrete. single passenger as the quantum that made There are, furthermore, stairs and there is such journeys meaningful. As the documents street furniture: bus stops, benches, kiosks, concerning its inception show, the bollards etc. experience of time, waiting, spectating and Waiting, as I see it, is a form of transition were crucial concerns. While preparation. For instance, journeys to and dedicated to movement, Slussen provided from work in the city mean that we are an experience of the city as intense physically on the way. In our minds, momentary stasis. however, as we ready ourselves for coming From a standpoint informed by early tasks or meetings, we are elsewhere, that is, Science and Technology Studies (Bijker we are not necessarily concentrating on the 1995) as well as recent Film Studies work on path. A secondary moral of “The Story of the k(c)inematic in urban experience (Hallam Johnny Head-in-Air,” one of the ten 2010), this paper uses archival sources, cautionary tales from Heinrich Hoffmann’s contemporary film footage and photo Struwwelpeter, is then that guardrails should images to argue Slussen ’s significance as a have been fitted along the canal, which machine for curating the extended moment Johnny walked straight into. The fact that he of waiting in the city. The paper shows how felt confident enough to stroll while staring Slussen destabilizes categories we often take at the clouds also points to his faith in a clear for granted in the analysis of urban space and smooth pavement. Indeed, such trust in (interior/exterior; temporary/permanent; the continuity and regularity of our public traffic/infrastructure; flowing/stationary) and footways, which is far from a given, is re–positions Slussen in a discourse on the essential to our ability to “wait” while we urban that includes Banhams’ Los Angeles walk. Where this faith is broken, it is maybe the Four Ecologies and Koolhaas’ Delirious best to verify the safety of each next step. New York. I propose, specifically, to identify and describe several types of urban walkway. Then, in a second section, I will give a ‘Those Who Wait’. Siegfried phenomenological account of the modalities Kracauer, architecture and the of pedestrian waiting, reflecting on the 21th-century ‘precariat’ manner in which those modalities might be Christophe Van Gerrewey, École reflected in streets’ arrangement or polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne equipment (or in the lack thereof). (EPFL) In 1922, Siegfried Kracauer publishes an essay entitled ‘Those Who Wait’. He V.9 describes how inhabitants of urban transitional point before entering or moving environments have lost their faith in religious to another in which no actual movements of truth. At the same time, they have cut the journey occur but time is implied. As themselves off from the restorative equally the waiting room becomes a world capacities of community.

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