SMArt Talks: Building Histories

2025

Nineteen years have passed since the publication of Anthony Alofsin’s seminal book When Buildings Speak: Architecture as Language in the Habsburg Empire and Its Aftermath, 1867–1933. Its call to read modern Central European architecture as a language that “speaks” to us remains a foundational principle for historians today. Yet the field of architectural history has also shifted. How have new approaches, especially postcolonial theories, reshaped the ways we interpret architecture?

This autumn, SMArt Talks takes up these questions in its new series, Building Histories, offering critical perspectives on how historians of architecture, alongside the visual arts, mediate and reinterpret historical and cultural canons. The lectures traverse sites from the Balkans to Germany, exploring how moments of rupture, restoration, and reinterpretation shape how we inhabit and understand the past. 

In September, Cosmin Minea opens the series with an exploration of how monuments in Romania and Serbia have been preserved, transformed, or neglected, revealing the contested national narratives they embody. In October, Aida Murtić revisits the devastating Sarajevo fire of 1879, a turning point that became both a symbol of imperial modernisation and a means of administrative control. November takes us into the glass-walled ateliers of Dessau’s Bauhaus Masters’ Houses, where Robin Schuldenfrei examines the lived realities of modernist ideals – past and present. Closing the semester before Christmas, Gabriela Seith traces the reverberations of Franz Ferdinand’s assassination in contemporary art, reframing Bosnia’s history through a postcolonial lens.

Together, these talks will reveal how architecture and events become frameworks for identity, political power, and cultural imagination, showing that building histories is as much about shaping futures as it is about preserving the past.