01. Juni |  19:00   |  Reinhold Martin (New York)

»The Architecture of the American University 1750-1950«

This lecture traces a historical arc between two university libraries: the Rotunda at the University of Virginia, designed by Thomas Jefferson and completed in 1826, and Low Memorial Library at Columbia University, designed by McKim, Mead & White and completed in 1897. These two neoclassical domed buildings bracket the emergence of the modern research university in the United States. As such, their intertwined histories offer insight into the afterglow of Enlightenment and its antinomies more broadly. The lecture will follow this afterglow in its most tangible, material form—problem of illuminating the architectural space of the library—to discern the outlines of these broader formations. It will do so by treating the materiality of light in architectural terms as it enters (and configures) the university. The result will be a partial history of mediations between technical artifacts, knowledge practices, institutions, and aesthetic forms, in which no single level can be isolated as primary or causal.