An IASH Work-in-Progress Seminar, delivered by Professor Suzanne Ewing (Sabbatical Fellow, 2024)
MINOR WORKS: deciphering architectural alteration
MINOR WORKS: deciphering architectural alteration, assembles an evolving lexicon of terms, methods and speculative practices relating to projects-in-motion. Reviewing the Edinburgh Public Library (opened in 1890, still in its original use) through modes and hierarchies of documented building alteration is an organizing scaffold. The appearance of the Ladies Reading Room on an early design drawing, yet the room’s subsequent disappearance (or absorption) in the configuration of the top floor Reference Room is one minor works prompt that I am following. This presentation reflects on the lost history and situated qualities of the Ladies Reading Room, exploring spatial alteration, environmental adjustment and institutional re-organisation as significant practices of transformation.
Suzanne Ewing holds a Personal Chair of Architectural Criticism at the University of Edinburgh. She is an architect, academic and educator who works at the intersection of humanities and design. Her research, pedagogical design and criticism explore the skills, cultures, ethics and potentials of practice-based methodologies in architecture: from the pre-figuring of ground, to temporalities of site-specific work, to critical readings and imaginings of erasures in architecture. Publications include: Architecture and Field/Work (2010), Discipline’, ‘Disciplinary Practices’ (Special Issues of Architecture and Culture Journal, 2013, 2014), Spaces of Tolerance (2019) and Visual Research Methods in Architecture(2021). Since 2015 she has worked to augment knowledge of women’s contribution to architecture and the built environment in Scotland, through the collaborative Voices of Experience project. She also leads an interdisciplinary research network, Women Make Cities [https://women-make-cities.ed.ac.uk].
Please join in-person, or click the link below to join the webinar:
https://ed-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/83015772676
Passcode: b1QpaAD7