Royal Historical Society of Victoria

Inaugural Miles Lewis Oration delivered by Professor Alex Bremner
2022-05-26 18:30 - 20:00 (Australia/Melbourne) | Melbourne School of Design, Masson Rd, University of Melbourne, VIC, 3010, Australia
The Australian Centre of Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage is pleased to announce the inaugural Miles Lewis Oration , online and in the Japanese Room at the Melbourne School of Design.
The 2022 fellow is Professor Alex Bremner of the University of Edinburgh. Bremner will be giving a talk titled “Back to the Future: Architecture and the Geopolitics of Communications Technology in the Edwardian Era”, more information of which can be found in the Eventbrite registration link here.

The world is currently experiencing a telecommunications race the political implications of which are perilous. Extending far beyond corporate interests, concern rests with who creates, owns, and ultimately controls such technology, including the intervening power of the state. Such technology has in recent years become a proxy for international power politics as its potential uses raise alarm. The development and installation of 5G mobile phone infrastructure is perhaps the most widely publicised example of this concern.
This dilemma was rehearsed during the first telecommunications revolution in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. Then, as now, the geopolitical stakes were high, as the world’s great powers jostled for advantage. To control information was to control society and the economy, not just at ‘home’ but abroad. The ability to communicate over vast distances via the telegraph enabled European imperial powers, and Britain in particular, to govern their global empires in direct and newly systematic ways. These technologies required an infrastructural basis that necessarily took spatial form. Submarine cabling, as well as telegraph stations and offices, became ubiquitous features of this brave new world, as did the techno-utopian politics that accompanied them.
This lecture considers the architectural manifestations of this ‘first’ telecommunications age. It will highlight how the coalescence of these concerns in the context of global communications and conflict encouraged ideas of closer union between Britain and its colonial empire. Particular attention will be paid to how, in this context, the Edwardian Baroque movement in British architecture sought to present ‘Greater Britain’ as a strong and coherent cultural and political unit. Buildings associated with communications technology, such as post offices and telegraph companies, were one form that embodied this idea. The rhetorical dimensions of this architecture in relation to the projection of imperial power across the British world will form the lecture’s focus.
Alex Bremner is Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh. He specialises in the history and theory of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British architecture, including British imperial/colonial architecture, architecture and energy in the context of climate change, and the spatial networks of commodity exchange in the Asia-Pacific region. His books include Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire, c.1840-1870 (2013) and (ed.) Architecture and Urbanism in the British Empire (2016). He is currently completing a new study entitled Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c.1885-1920, to be published by the Paul Mellon Centre and Yale University Press in Autumn 2022.
Please ensure you register
The link is here : https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/acahuch-inaugural-miles-lewis-oration-prof-alex-bremner-uedinburgh-tickets-334404451717
Zoom link will be made available after registration.
The event will be recorded and a link will be posted to the ACAHUCH website and the Melbourne School of Design Youtube under the ACAHUCH playlist in the weeks after the event.
Professor Bremner is joining ACAHUCH for April of 2022, supported by the Miles Lewis Fellowship at the Faculty of Architecure, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne.

Public Symposium: Australasia & the Global Turn in Architectural History Symposium
2022-04-27 09:00 - 12:30
A symposium exploring the expansion of the new edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture that encompass Australasia
Convened by Macarena de la Vega de León and Paul Walker, this event will be held in person at the Melbourne School of Design, and on Zoom. Note, not all panellists will be in person at the Symposium
Link will be made available after registration.
The writing of architectural history shifted with the turn of the twenty-first century. Theoretical and methodological reassessments, as well as the study of postcolonial theories in architecture, challenged the previously accepted disciplinary canon and made the development of a global history of architecture urgent. More than twenty years later, there has been resulting literature, disciplinary reassessments, and continuous debate around the meaning of global in the history of architecture. One of the latest additions to the field, the new edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s rebranded as Global History of Architecture (2019), is proof of the continuous scholarly interest in reframing the global.
Although historians of architecture in the region have contributed their expertise in the Global South to some of the resulting publications, there is still a limited presence of an Australasian perspective. In general, the field continues to present challenges in combining these geographies and cultures, in defining the notion of region, in the periodization of narratives and in capturing transnational connections. The aim of this event is twofold: on the one hand, to celebrate the publication of Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture highlighting the Australasian contributions to the volume; on the other, to open a wider discussion on the global issues of gender, race and migration in architecture that continue to have a limited presence in global narratives. To critically review the most recent literature on the global is necessary to inform next steps.

Session 1_ Wednesday 27 April, 9am-10.45am
Murray Fraser, “A Provisional, Collectivised Global History.”
Vimalin Rujivacharakul, “Buildings of the Oceans: Ephemerality and Monumentality in Architectural History.”
Deidre Brown, “Decolonising and Indigenising Architectural History.”
Amanda Achmadi and Paul Walker, “Writing architecture across colonial borders: ‘Southeast Asia, Australia and the Pacific, 1780-1914.’”
Philip Goad, “Time for Global Reassessment: Architectural Histories of Southeast Asia, Australasia and Oceania.”
Session 2_ Wednesday 27 April, 11am.-12.30pm
Mark Jarzombek, “Beyond History?”
Vikram Prakash, “Eventualities: The Agency of Architectural Historiography in Decolonization.”
Joanna Merwood-Salisbury, “Race and the Historiography of American Architecture.”
Mirjana Lozanovska, “Theory + History = Historiography.”
Karen Burns and Lori Brown, “Women, Global History, and the Nation State.”
BOOK HERE

Murray Fraser (pictured) is Professor of Architecture and Global Culture at UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture, and Chair of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. In 2008 his book Architecture and the ‘Special Relationship’ won the RIBA Research Award and CICA Bruno Zevi Book Prize. He is General Editor for the 21st Edition of Sir Banister Fletcher’s Global History of Architecture (2020), awarded the SAHGB’s Colvin Prize. He received the 2018 RIBA Annie Spink Award for Excellence in Education.
