Join us for the next Architectural History and Theory Seminar Series of 25/26 by Shiben Banerji.
This lecture will be hybrid. Please book your ticket for attendance in person or online. You will receive access to the online event via email the day before the event.
Abstract
Words, such as 'baroque' and 'parklike' are notorious for having been used by architects and critics in the early twentieth century to describe two different approaches to urban planning. Less well understood is that, between 1910 and 1920, architects who prized the 'formal symmetry' of baroque plans and architects who prized the 'artful irregularity' of parklike plans each saw themselves as formulating spatial models for studying the past. This talk situates a transnational impulse to study the past spatially amid growing discontent with gridiron planning in the first decades of twentieth century. Defining modernism as a structure of explanation, rather than as a style, the talk argues that the modernist study of the past had the potential to explain social phenomena in a scale of time that was not strictly anthropocentric.
About Shiben Banerji
Shiben Banerji is an associate professor in the History of Art department at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Lineages of the Global City: Occult Modernism and the Spiritualization of Democracy (University of Texas Press, 2025) and the coeditor of In the Shadows of Democracy: Possibilities for Rhetoric beyond Rhetorical Studies (Intermezzo, 2025).
Image: Walter Burley Griffin, Castlecrag Estate, ca. 1921. Printed estate map showing lots, easements, and reserves annotated by hand in ink and pencil. Papers of Edgar Dean, National Library of Australia, MS 2019, Item 33.
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