BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Windows &amp\; Black Boxes – Oscillating Transparency in a Calm 
 Surveillance Society - Dr Kristin Veel (University of Copenhagen)
DTSTART:20131202T163000Z
DTEND:20131202T180000Z
UID:TALK48403@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Katie Stone
DESCRIPTION:Glass facades\, or large windowpanes\, which potentially give 
 full view of the interior spaces of a building\, have come to dominate muc
 h of new urban architecture all over the world since the 1990s. This has c
 reated new modes of living and of seeing in the urban context. Not only ha
 s it changed our way of appreciating architecture as creating a dividing l
 ine between interior and exterior spaces\, but also new codes for looking 
 into the interior of a building and for people inside the building to appr
 eciate the environment that surrounds the building have emerged.\n\nThis t
 alk will give an insight into the on-going collaborative work that I am do
 ing with Dr Henriette Steiner\, who works on the history and philosophy of
  architecture. One of our aims has been to situate the dominant use of lar
 ge windows or glass facades in a larger historical and theoretical framewo
 rk. In this paper I shall look at selected\, short pieces of literary repr
 esentations of urban environments\, i.e. Edgar Allan Poe’s seminal short
  story ‘Man of the Crowd’ from 1840\, Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1
 924) and the two recent novels 120 Tage von Berlin (2003) by Lukas Hammers
 tein andTeil der Lösung (2007) by Ulrich Peltzer. These literary works ar
 e situated in relation to a cultural theoretical argument\, drawing mainly
  on media theorist Alexander Galloway’s conceptualisation of the black b
 ox. The aim is to place this concept in relation to the historical develop
 ment of windows in urban settings – from the dense modern metropolis of 
 the industrial city of the mid-nineteenth century\, over the call for tran
 sparency of modernist architecture of the early twentieth century\, to tod
 ay’s use of large glass facades in post-industrial urban settings. Hereb
 y illuminating an interesting lopsided correlation between the notion of t
 ransparency in modern architectural culture and the logic of the black box
 \, in order to explore how the prevalence of glass in contemporary archite
 ctural culture can be seen as part of a contemporary so-called ‘calm sur
 veillance society’.  
LOCATION:326 Raised Faculty Building
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR