Masterclass by Ines Weizman

Hosted by Luís Urbano

In order to engage the multiple meanings and complex history of architecture’s modernisms and their history of migration and transfer, and to amalgamate a diffuse body of knowledge, the Centre for Documentary Architecture (CDA) has employed the methods of its namesake, “documentary architecture”. This means combining material clues and digital traces in examining a geography that cuts across scale – from the granularity of aggregate in concrete to the geopolitical carving of entire regions – and across history – from the beginning of the Weimar era to the present day. This masterclass with Ines Weizman analyses architecture on both sides of the infamous Sykes-Picot line. Based on a secret treaty concluded between the UK and France in 1916, this line partitioned the former Ottoman Empire and has fuelled an endless conflict ever since. Drawing upon her anthology Dust & Data. Traces of the Bauhaus across 100 Years, Weizman presents a series of connected case studies from early 20th-century architectural modernism, Bauhaus histories and the hundred-year history of modernism’s migration, exile and instrumentalisation for colonial expansion.