30th May 2014, 1-4pm, The Cinema, School of Arts, Birkbeck, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD

A symposium exploring the spatial dimensions of siege, destruction, renewal and commemoration during and in the aftermath of the First World War. Organised by the Architecture, Space and Society Network, Birkbeck.

1pm – introduction by Tag Gronberg

1.10pm Leslie Topp, Birkbeck

Utopia Under Siege: Habsburg Psychiatric Hospitals in World War I

1.45pm Volker Welter, University of California Santa Barbara

‘Open Order’ – ‘Open Plan’: On a Possible Root of Modernist Architecture in the Battlefields of the Great War

2.15pm – discussion

2.30pm Tim Skelton, Independent Scholar and author (with G. Gliddon), of Lutyens and the Great War (2009),

The Cenotaph – Architectural Journalism or Something More? (PLEASE NOTE – Tim Skelton is unable to attend, so his paper will be read by Zoe Opacic)

3.05pm Roger Bowdler, English Heritage

The Urge to Remember: English Commemorative Responses to the First World War

3.35 pm – discussion

4pm – close