MSD at HOME: Melbourne Speaks :: Hélène Frichot
Online - ABP Zoom Webinar
Infrastructural Love and Other Architectural Affects
This lecture is dedicated to infrastructural love posited as a reorientation of our thinking with and practicing of architecture. Drawing on collaborative work undertaken with colleagues and students between 2018 to 2019 in Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, I offer an account of our attempts to rethink and expand architectural practices and pedagogies in response to the environmental, social and political crises we are suffering today. Our research was derived from an active dialogue with students in the pedagogical space of the studio, itself an infrastructure for critical thinking. Drawing on affect theory and relational architectural ecologies, learning from the architectural humanities where it intersects with the environmental humanities and the posthumanities, architecture was explored as a distributed relational complex, rather than as a suite of autonomous objects. In addition, a feminist ethics of care was emphasized as central to the studio ethos. I’ll take this opportunity to describe our instructional approach, including the irrational section cut, the smooth montage, and the dirty model, and I’ll conclude with a new conceptual formulation that emerged out of our endeavours, and that is what we came to call a ‘poetic pragmatics.’
Infrastructural Love is currently being developed as a book project with: Hélène Frichot, Sepideh Karami, Hannes Frykolm, Adrià Carbonell Rabassa (editors).
About our presenter:
Hélène Frichot is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, and Director of the Bachelor of Design, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne, Australia. She is Guest Professor and the former Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, School of Architecture, KTH (Royal Institute of Technology) Stockholm, Sweden, where she was based between 2012-2019. Drawing on the two disciplines in which she is trained, architecture and philosophy, her research engages a transdisciplinary field by experimenting with feminist theories and practices, specifically drawing on new materialism and the post-humanities. In 2017 she was the recipient of a Riksbankens Jubileumsfond Swedish sabbatical grant, outcomes of which included Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018), and with Isabelle Doucet, a special edition of ATR (Architectural Theory Review), Resist, Reclaim, Speculate: Situated Perspectives on Architecture and the City, 2018. She was an editor and the project leader on the double volume Architecture in Effect (Actar 2019), gathering research emerging from a FORMAS Swedish Research Council funded Strong Research Environment of the same name. With Catharina Gabrielsson she participated on the Vetenskapsrådet Swedish Research Council grant, Transversal Writing, one writing experiment of which was recently published with the TU Delft journal Writingplace (2019). She is the author of How to Make Yourself a Feminist Design Power Tool (AADR 2016), and Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019) and editor on a number of publications. She is on the steering group of the AHRA (Architectural Humanities Research Association, based in the UK. Forthcoming publications include: Hélène Frichot and Naomi Stead (eds) Writing Architectures: Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020); Marko Jobst and Hélène Frichot, Architectural Affects: After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021).
Presentation and Q+A
Date: Tuesday 01 September 2020
Time: 18:00 - 19:30 AEST* Melbourne (UTC +10)
Venue: Online - ABP Zoom Webinar
Event link: Once you have registered for the event, the event link will be sent to you via your Eventbrite confirmation email and reminder emails.
*Singapore: Tuesday, 01 September 2020, 16:00 - 17:30; SGT
*Dubai: Tuesday, 01 September 2020, 12:00 - 13:30; GST
*London: Tuesday, 01 September 2020, 09:00 - 10:30; BST
*NYC: Tuesday, 01 September 2020, 04:00 - 05:30; EDT
*Los Angeles: Tuesday, 01 September 2020, 01:00 - 02:30; PDT
Image Captions:
Erik Lokrantz, Non-Human Embassy. Hélène Frichot, Sepideh Karami, Hannes Frykolm, Adrià Carbonell Rabassa Critical Studies in Architecture, 2019.
Erik Lokrantz, Marie Le Rouzic, Ekatrerina Ultina, Israa Sanir El Dallal, Solna Centrum/Näckarosen/Hallonbergen/Kista Centrum/Husby/Akalla: 100 Infrastructural Details. Hélène Frichot, Sepideh Karami, Hannes Frykolm, Adrià Carbonell Rabassa Critical Studies in Architecture, 2018.