Lecture Series Architectural Research

Robert Jan van Pelt has been teaching at the University of Waterloo School of Architecture since 1987 and has held positions at many institutions of higher education worldwide, including the AA London, TU Vienna, University of Kassel, National University of Singapore, University of Virginia, Clark University, and MIT. He has published 13 books dealing with topics such as the cosmic speculations on the Temple of Solomon, relativism in architectural history, the history of Auschwitz, the history of the Holocaust, Jewish refugees, Holocaust denial, and his most recent work, An Atlas of Jewish Space, which coincided with the opening of a new synagogue at the Babyn Yar massacre site in Kyiv in 2021. Most recently, he has completed a book on the history of concentration camp barracks which will appear with Park Books. His forensic work on the crematoria of Auschwitz generated „The Evidence Room“, an installation, created in collaboration with Waterloo professors Anne Bordeleau and Donald McKay, first shown at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale. Van Pelt is the chief curator of the international traveling exhibtion „Auschwitz. Not Far Away. Not Long Ago“. He was also a member of the KPMBDaoust Lestage architectural team that won the competition for a new home for the Montreal Holocaust Museum.

Salvatore Pisani is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural History at the University of Mainz. After studying in Heidelberg, Berlin (TU) and Paris (EHESS), he worked at research institutes and universities in Florence, Zurich (ETH) and Saarbrücken. Currently, together with Gregor Wedekind, he is leading a research project on 19th century Parisian Street Furniture, supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG), in which the new set of street lamps, advertising columns, benches, newspaper kiosks, public toilets and much more are being studied with a particular view to their role in the development of modern urbanity. It pursues the thesis that the net-like dispositive of everyday objects discreetly shapes and choreographs certain forms of action and thus public space. As a modern administrative state, France has developed a specific subpolitics, in other words, a latent grammar of governance that has been translated into a grammar of the street – and vice versa.