ISA Lecture_Petra Brouwer

Power relations in architectural history writing
Evaluating Dutch architecture

ISA Lecture by Petra Brouwer (University of Amsterdam)

Wednesday April 14, 2021
7.00 p.m., online on MS Teams (access code: bc63lfn or click here) 

Why is it that the Eurocentric depreciation of ‘other’ cultures also applies to most European countries? How can we explain that the ‘national architecture’ of most European countries has been excluded from the architectural canon? In her lecture Power relations in architectural history writing. Evaluating Dutch architecture Petra Brouwer will analyse how Eurocentric tropes, such as othering, self-centering and self-inferiorising, shaped architectural historiography of the Netherlands. More general, she will discuss in what ways postcolonial critique on Eurocentrism could open up new perspectives on Europe’s own architectural canon.

Petra Brouwer is an architectural historian at the University of Amsterdam, specializing in modern and contemporary history and historiography of architecture and town planning. From 2017-2020 she was editor in chief of Architectural Histories, the open access peer reviewed journal of the European Architectural History Network. Her current book projects are World Histories of Architecture. The Emergence of a New Genre in the Nineteenth Century (with Martin Bressani and Christopher Drew Armstrong), under contract with MIT Press, and a history on Amsterdam as a compact city 1970-2000 (with Tim Verlaan). In 2020 she co-edited with Kristina Jõekalda a special issue for the Journal of Architecture on European peripheries of Architectural Historiography.