Friday 12 February, 2016 beginning 5pm at Keynes Library

Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

Fragments of memory are omnipresent in the belly of the architect, as they are appear assembled in the Autoritratto Architettonico of the Swiss architects Fabio Reinhard and Bruno Reichlin.

As witness of this omnipresence the lecture will not dwell on a postmodern artist but rather the architect of an amnestic modernity par excellence, Mies van der Rohe. Since his rupture with history was programmatic, the focus will be on a the work from his oeuvre that is least suspect of the charge of historicism – the German Pavilion for the Barcelona Exposition (1929).

Mies’ pavilion allows a “free play” for memories of historical architecture, which are present not by dint of quotation but rather through the art of leaving out and intimation in the sense of Umberto Eco’s concept of the “opera aperta”.

Norbert Nussbaum is a distinguished architectural historian and author of seminal studies on German medieval architecture and on Gothic vaults. He is also deeply engaged with contemporary architectural issues, as well as investigation, reconstruction and conservation of buildings.

Professor Nussbaum will inaugurate ASSC’s Thinkers in Architecture series, which brings to Birkbeck prominent architectural historians, critics and thinkers to give extended talks about issues emerging from their research.

Attendance is free and open to all but registration here is required.