03/04/2024
Greetings from Lawrence Hall. To celebrate the legacy of former UO professor Marion Dean Ross and his founding of the Department of the History of Art and Architecture some 60 years ago, we have put together a Spring 2024 lecture series and a small online exhibition (forthcoming) that may be of interest to some of you. Given the extensive collection of student-made models from Ross’s classes still visible around Lawrence Hall, we decided to focus the series on the theme of ARCHITECTURAL MODELS AND WORLD-BUILDING. Attached is a flyer indicating the speakers (Wharton, Wolf, Fankhanel) and the dates and titles of their talks. Please note that lecture locations may change in the coming weeks due to room scheduling difficulties. Below are excerpts from the speakers’ departmental pages.
Speakers:
Annabel Wharton, William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History, Duke University. She served as the first female Vincent Scully Visiting Professor at the Yale School of Architecture in 2014 and as the Harry Porter Visiting Professor of Architectural History, University of Virginia School of Architecture in 2019. She received her Ph.D. at the Courtauld Institute, London University. Initially her research focused on Late Ancient and Byzantine art and culture (Art of Empire [Penn State] and Refiguring the Post-Classical City [Cambridge]). Then she began to investigate the effects of modernity on ancient landscapes, notably in Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture (Chicago, 2001). She has combined her interests in the Ancient and the Modern in her last two books: Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replicas, Theme Parks (Chicago, 2006) and Architectural Agents: The Delusional, Abusive, Addictive Lives of Buildings (Minnesota, 2015). Architectural Agents considers material and digital buildings as agents that both endure pain and inflict it. Her new book, Models and World Making: Buildings, Bodies, Black Boxes (University of Virginia Press) will appear at the end of 2021.
Mark J. P. Wolf is a Professor in the Communication Department at Concordia University Wisconsin. He has a B. A. (1990) in Film Production and an M. A. (1992) and Ph. D. (1995) in Critical Studies from the School of Cinema/Television (now renamed the School of Cinematic Arts) at the University of Southern California. His books include Abstracting Reality: Art, Communication, and Cognition in the Digital Age (2000), The Medium of the Video Game (2001), Virtual Morality: Morals, Ethics, and New Media (2003), The Video Game Theory Reader (2003), The Video Game Explosion: A History from PONG to PlayStation and Beyond (2007), The Video Game Theory Reader 2 (2008), Myst and Riven: The World of the D’ni (2011), Before the Crash: Early Video Game History (2012), the two-volume Encyclopedia of Video Games: The Culture, Technology, and Art of Gaming (2012), Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation (2012), The Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014), LEGO Studies: Examining the Building Blocks of a Transmedial Phenomenon (2014), Video Games Around the World (2015), the four-volume Video Games and Gaming Cultures (2016), Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: A Subcreation Studies Anthology (2017), Video Games FAQ (2017), The World of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (2017), The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds (2017), The Routledge Companion to Media History and Obsolescence (2018), and two novels for which he is looking for a publisher. He is also founder and co-editor of the Landmark Video Game book series from University of Michigan Press, founder and editor of the Imaginary Worlds book series from Routledge, and founder of the Video Game Studies Scholarly Interest Group and the Transmedia Studies Special Interest Group within the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. He has been invited to speak in North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Second Life, and has had work published in journals including Compar(a)ison, Convergence, Film Quarterly, Games and Culture, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Projections, and The Velvet Light Trap. He is on the advisory boards of Videotopia, the International Arcade Museum Library, and the International Journal of Gaming and Computer-Mediated Simulations; and is on several editorial boards including those of Games and Culture and The Journal of E-media Studies.
Teresa Fankhänel is a curator and writer. Before joining the MSU Broad Art Museum in 2022, she was a curator at the Architecture Museum in Munich (Germany) and an associate professor at the Department of Architectural History and Curatorial Practice at the Architecture School of the Technical University of Munich. Her exhibitions include The Architectural Model (2012), Werkzeuge des Entwerfens (2017), African Mobilities (2018), The Architecture Machine (2020–21), Built Together (2021), Shouldn’t You Be Working? (2023) and Andrea Canepa: As We Dwell in the Fold (2023). Her writing focuses on model making, computation, archival strategies, the practice and theory of exhibition making, and architectural design practices.
