Tabletalks on Architecture was a lecture series produced by a group of university assistants at the Faculty of Architecture, TU Graz between 2016 and 2017. The initiative was conceived as as means to foster current research and as a casual event outside of formal university structures where academics, students, and practicing architects can converge, engage, exchange, and discuss matters related to architecture and architectural research.

Founding members of the initiative include Constantinos Miltiadis, Diederik de Koning, Marcello Fantuz, Sophia Walk, and Christoph Braser.
Graphic design by Lilly Hafner.

Tabletalks on Architecture ran between 2016 and 2017 with four sessions listed below. All events took place at Cafe Kork and were free and open to the public.

Tabletalks archive

TToA 1: Diederik de Koning – Agricultural Architecture & Land Management

• TToA 1 event poster
• Tuesday, 06.12.2016, 18:00
• Kork, Lessingstraße 25, 8010 Graz

This tabletalk will focus on the role of architect-educators in the design of agricultural buildings and land settlement for the post-war European countryside. The research aims at building up the required body of knowledge for establishing an international discourse on agricultural design as part of the architectural discipline.

Diederik de Koning graduated cum laude in architecture from Delft University of Technology, and also holds a master’s degree in Environmental and Infrastructure Planning from the University of Groningen. Since the spring of 2013 he has taught a variety of courses at The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design in Delft. He now works for the Institute of Architecture and Landscape at Graz University of Technology. He is currently working on his PhD research at the Borders & Territories research group at TU Delft, which deals with agricultural buildings in the post-war European countryside. Results of the research have been presented at conferences in Warsaw and Venice in 2016. In parallel, he runs an independent architecture practice together with Laura van Santen under the name la-di-da (http://www.la-di-da.nl/) which was recently included as one of the 33 invited young Dutch and Flemish offices to present their work as part of the 2016 “MAATWERK/MASSARBEIT” exhibition at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Frankfurt.

TToA 2 – Petra Eckhard: The Anti-canon of Architectural Modernism

• TToA 2 event poster
• Tuesday, 10.01.2017, 18:00
• Kork, Lessingstraße 25, 8010 Graz

In her talk Petra Eckhard will explore architectural structures located in the Western hemisphere which emerged during the second half of the 20th century as an anti-canon of modernist architecture. As manifestations of personal desires and individual creativity, the works analysed have been realised without the burden of economic, functional, temporal or aesthetic restrictions–aspects which usually accompany architectural practice. In their important function as foils, the anti-canonic works discussed unfold a special relationship to modernist forms, which paradoxically does both counteract and mirror the “greatness” and hubris associated with the modernist canon.

Petra Eckhard is a literary and cultural studies scholar at the Institute of Architectural Theory, Art History and Cultural Studies at Graz University of Technology. She studied English and American Studies in New York, Bern and Graz, where she also received her doctorate in 2010. Her fields of interdisciplinary research involve practices of architectural writing, postmodernist works of literature and architecture as well as their cultural implications. She is the author of “Chronotopes of the Uncanny” (2011) and co-editor of Graz Architecture Magazine (GAM). Currently, she is working on her second book which explores the anti-canon of modernist architecture.

TToA 3: Mars, Miltiadis, Sekulić – Metadata Punks

• TToA 3 event poster
• Tuesday, 21.03.2017, 18:00
• Kork, Lessingstraße 25, 8010 Graz

See Metadata Punks.

TToA 4: Christoph Walter Pirker – Visual Ontologies of the Indefinite

• TToA 4 event poster
• Tuesday, 13.06.2017, 18:00
• Kork, Lessingstraße 25, 8010 Graz

In the epoch of the Anthropocene, human and non-human agencies are entangled in an extensive fabric, which determines the condition of our world. Such fabric is not balanced in a static equilibrium, but conceived as a flowing and intensive coexistence of currents and conditions, which define the expressions of our environment. The Anthropocene not only gains its geological importance by having inscribed the human’s impact in the geological strata of the planet, but similarly by formulating the conception of geological strata as artificial and virtual layers containing a productive, yet unknown potential.

The dynamic of the anthropocenic fabric brings about a new approach to ontogenesis, which no longer occurs by means of substantialist or hylomorphic principles, but through the process of becoming in the intra-action between the natural and the cultural, the conscious and the unconscious, the visible and the invisible. Matter is conceived as a living entity, which intra-acts with the human in complex networks, thereby abolishing traditional hierarchies and dichotomies imposed by the hegemonic system. To investigate such complexity by focusing on the construction of space is the aim of this research, while concurrently rendering visible the overall construction of the anthropocenic fabric.

Paul Virilio dates the origin of a global overformation with the development of the war landscape. It shows the anthropocenic fabric in its global dimensions, constructing an artificial climate and an ecology wherein the real and the virtual move and continuously flow together. Thereby, the construction of the bunker is seen as the mirror image of such war landscape, no longer being object or artefact, but an integral part or knot within the artificial fabric. Its geological investigation allows to consider the rhythm of the Anthropocene in its totality and to establish its rhythmic material as a tool for future inquiry and research. In referring to the notion of duration, “Visual ontologies of the indefinite” outlines an intra-acting method, which stands in a geological present and understands the geological relict as an atmospheric particle of our immediate environment. Developing practices of embodiment and intuition, the field of warfare is thus not conceived as a mere historic seclusion, but as vibrating object of investigation for our planetary entanglement, encompassing politics, ideology, space, media, visuality, and art to a cohesive body of action.

Christoph Walter Pirker (1989) is Assistant professor at the Institute for Architecture and Landscape at the Graz University of Technology. Furthermore, he is trained as an architect, musician, and visual artist. His transdisciplinary interest is based on studies at the University of Music and Performing Arts, Graz, the TU Graz and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, Denmark. Highly engaged in practices of performative research, he is currently working on his PhD project (supervised by Milica Tomić) entitled “Visual ontologies of the indefinite –Investigating spatial relationships of the human, the non-human, and the unknown”. The doctoral thesis is a continuation of the 2015 master thesis, which was awarded the Graz Architecture Diploma Award in October 2016. His work is at studiobirkenblau.com