Welcome to a guest lecture on art history!
Prof. Alex Bremner, University of Edinburgh:
Imperial Reverberations: Architecture, Identity, and Geo-political Rivalry
Time: 7.5.2024, at 16.15
Venue: University of Helsinki Main Building (Unioninkatu 34), Lecture Hall U4075
Abstract:
This talk will engage some of the salient cultural, political, and technological themes from Alex Bremner’s recent book Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c.1885-1920 (Yale UP/PMC, 2022). It will consider in particular those determinants that underpinned and helped shape Edwardian Baroque architecture’s response to late Victorian crises concerning global world order. In this the Edwardian Baroque will be employed as a lens through which wider concerns over the harnessing of technology, imperial anxiety, and British identity and masculinity will be examined in explaining efforts at ‘building’ a more resilient sense of imperial nationhood across the British world. The fundamental questions explored will be: Why should we study an architectural genre such as the so-called Edwardian Baroque? What is it, and how did it emerge? What were its defining features/characteristics? And are there any lessons that a close study of it might reveal to us? In a world that is once again riven by great power rivalry and the politics of identity, an artistic movement such as the Edwardian Baroque offers intriguing, if somewhat disturbing, echoes from the past.
Alex Bremner is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. His research focuses on the history and theory of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British architecture, with a special interest in British imperial and colonial architecture. His books include Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.1840–1870 (2013), Architecture and the British Empire (2016, 2020), and Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c.1885–1920 (2022). He is currently completing a new history of Victorian architecture for Oxford University Press, scheduled to appear in 2025.??
Architecture History Lectures is a series of guest lectures organized by Anna Ripatti and Markus Lähteenmäki as part of the research project The Political Agency of Architecture in Revolutionary Europe, 1830–1930, Department of Cultures, Art History.
This is an in-person event. It will not be streamed or recorded.<$DetailsLisatietojaLinkki$>
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