ACAHUCH

ACAHUCH International

Showcasing collaborative presentations between ACAHUCH and electives at the Melbourne School of Design, including Critical and Curatorial Practices in Design, Architecture Design Studios, and the Masters of Urban and Cultural Heritage (MUCH) program.

• ACAHUCH INTERNATIONAL | Jorge Otero-Pailos (UC)

  Please join us for the last MSD Public Lecture for 2022 with Professor Jorge Otero-Pailos, Director of Historic Preservation, Columbia University. Dust, the kind the atmosphere deposits on buildings, is an important historical and environmental record that usually goes unrecognized.

  The artworks in The Ethics of Dust series isolate dust and make it tangible by transferring it from the surface of buildings onto translucent casts. In this lecture, I will present a selection of dust casts taken from buildings around the world, and discuss the unexpected histories that each of them unveils. I will connect the dots between these punctual histories to outline a larger concept they all contribute to, namely that of atmospheric heritage.

• ACAHUCH INTERNATIONAL | Eva Branscome (Bartlett, UCL) on Hans Hollein's 'Austrienalle'

  ACAHUCH International | Eva Branscome (Bartlett, UCL) on Hans Hollein's 'Austrienalle' | 26.04.22

  This lecture will discuss the curation of the 1968 Milan Triennale Austrian Pavillion by Austrian Architect and Artist, Hans Hollein. Looking at ‘The Great Number’ through Austrian glasses: Hans Hollein’s Exhibition at the 1968 Milan Triennale In 1968 the Austrian architect and artist, Hans Hollein, was asked to curate the Austrian Pavilion for the 14th Triennale in Milan.

  The exhibition’s theme, ‘The Great Number’, was intended to address a growing disenchantment within modernity manifesting itself through global issues such as overpopulation, overproduction, mass waste, increased mobility, as well as social and psychological alienation: topics that had become increasingly urgent. Hollein’s response was to create an action-environment. Titled the ‘Austriennale’ it consisted of a Freudian and Kafkaesque experience of parallel corridors titled ‘supermarket’, ‘waste’, ‘snowstorm’, ‘overcrowding’, ‘frustration’, ‘population increase’, ‘dead-end’, and finally ‘isolation/individualisation’. Hollein’s idea was to address the problems arising in the post-war globalised world within a specifically local Austrian context.

  The end of WWII had created a deep sense of cultural dislocation for Austria. Rediscovering the nation’s cultural and historical specificity beyond a Nazi agenda, or the commercial imperative of mass tourism, was crucial to artistic production for Hollein and others. Culturally Catholic, the influx of colonizing influences which arrived in Austrian via post-war American re-education initiatives created during the 1960s unexpected artistic mutations of pop, communication, commodification, Cold War science, and the spectre of the apocalypse, while some contributors were also seduced by the extreme escapist option of simply living in a bubble on the moon. These concepts were fused within a typically Austrian attitude which combined cynicism, sex, and the abandoning of limits by an avant-garde that, along with Hollein, was preoccupied with the human body.

  Ironically, the Milan Triennale was closed down and occupied during the 1968 student uprisings as a manifestation of the global problems it was seeking to address. Additionally, and intended as a provocation culturally specific to the Austrian situation, the Vienna Aktionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler proposed his own alternative action-environment as a retort to Hollein's pavilion. The ‘Austriennale’ installation can thus be read as a fertile cauldron for art, architecture and exhibition design encapsulating the aspirations and fears of the European avant-garde against the backdrop of US hegemony and Cold War anxiety. Chaired by Professor Alan Pert (Deputy Dean of Melbourne School of Design).

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  Dr Eva Branscome has been working at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London since 2012. Originally trained as an interior architect, Eva studied for her PhD at the Bartlett. Her research and teaching work has two main strands: the first engages with the links between built heritage and cultural practices in contemporary Western cities, whether expressed through cultural institutions or counter-cultural and street art; the second is in the 19th- and 20th-century architectural history of Central Europe, focussing particularly upon Austria and other regions in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.

  Eva’s work concentrates particularly on the intersections of architecture and media, such as exhibitions, publications, and photography, as well as museum architecture as a cultural and urban hinge. These topics intersect with her extensive experience in British architectural heritage having spent a decade as a caseworker for the Twentieth Century Society. Eva has published extensively – including Hans Hollein and Postmodernism (Routledge, 2019), the first major monograph on that architect-artist. She has co-curated exhibitions at the MAK Gallery in Vienna, ICA in London and Museum Abteiberg in Germany, and has previously taught architectural history at Queen Mary University, Oxford Brookes University and the University of Westminster.
• ACAHUCH INTERNATIONAL | Pippo Ciorra (MAXXI) + Scott Woods (MSD) on Aldo Rossi : Exhibitions

  Join Pippo Ciorra, Senior Curator at MAXXI, and Scott Woods , Academic Fellow at MSD and member of the Australian Centre of Architectural History Urban and Cultural Heritage, to discuss 'Aldo Rossi : Exhibitions' in the lead-up to MAXXI's December retrospective.

• ACAHUCH + CCPD | Langlands & Bell and Prof Alan Pert

  Langlands & Bell are two artists who work collaboratively. Ben Langlands (born London 1955) and Nikki Bell (born London 1959), began collaborating in 1978. Their artistic practice ranges from sculpture, film and video, to innovative digital media projects, art installations and full-scale architecture. Their work focuses on the complex web of relationships linking people with architecture and the built environment, and on a wider global level, the coded systems of mass-communications and exchange we use to negotiate an increasingly fast-changing technological world. The Turner Prize nominated British artists have never shied away from delving into risky subjects, especially those that reopen the old wounds of human history. For the artists, architectural structures bear witness to the political, cultural and economic events that have shaped our world. The very survival of these structures serves as moments of truth for times that have since come and gone.

  Throughout their four-decade career Langlands & Bell have consistently revealed both the beauty and violence behind some of the world’s most historically challenging structures. This includes their Turner Prize-shortlisted interactive work The House of Osama bin Laden that was commissioned in 2002 by London’s Imperial War Museum to document and investigate postwar Afghanistan as part of the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and which saw the artists venture inside the former home of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. In 2020, Langlands & Bell created work inspired by British architect Sir John Soane for their show Degrees of Truth (4 March 2020-3 January 2021) at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London exploring the complex web of relationships between people, architecture and today’s technological systems of communication. As the artists continually demonstrate, the historical monuments of our past act as reminders of periods of history that have had an immense and undeniable effect on the realities that shape our present world.

  The largest artworks to date by Langlands & Bell are, the 2004 Paddington Basin Bridge, designed in association with Atelier One (structural engineers), an 8-metre high x 45-metre long white metal and glass pedestrian bridge linking Paddington station and the new Paddington Basin Development, London, with a capacity of up to 20,000 people per day; Moving World (Night & Day) (2007) — two 6 x 18-metre permanent outdoor sculptures of steel, glass, and digitally controlled neon at Heathrow Terminal 5; and China, Language of Places (2009), the 18-metre wall painting exhibited in English Lounge at Tang Contemporary Art, 798, Beijing in 2009. Their most recent exhibition, Ideas of Utopia, presented their work at Charleston, the modernist former home and studio of radical twentieth-century painters Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. The show presented works of art which examine attempts – knowing and unknowing – to create utopias whether domestic, religious, social or commercial. The exhibition also considers Charleston as an important place of early modernist social experimentation and questions a building’s power to unite us, separate us, protect us, and inspire thought and creativity.

  Critical and Curatorial Practices in Design is a research project led by Professor Pert, and is hosted by ACAHUCH at the Melbourne School of Design, the University of Melbourne.

• ACAHUCH + CCPD | Dr Bettina Schlorhaufer and Prof Alan Pert

  Join Professor Alan Pert (Director, Melbourne School of Design and Member of The Australian Centre of Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage ) and Dr Bettina Schlorhaufer (Lecturer of Architectural Theory in the Arbeitsgruppe Achitekturtheorie at the Universität Innsbruck (UIBK),  to showcase her research on Martin Wagner's competition "Das wachsende Haus" (The Growing House), with entries by Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius', other proponents proposing similar schemes like Adolf Loos and Margarethe Schütte-Lihotzky, and its relation to Ernest Fooks', his own entry to the competition "Kernhaus", and the influence these sorts of competitions had on the approach to residential architecture by graduates of the Bauhaus.

• ACAHUCH + CCPD | Dr Albena Yaneva and Prof Alan Pert

  Join Professor Alan Pert (Director, Melbourne School of Design and Member of The Australian Centre of Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage ) and Dr Albena Yaneva (Professor of Architectural Theory, Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG), Manchester Urban Institute, University of Manchester) to discuss her forthcoming book 'Crafting History' which explores the Architectural Archive.