SMArt Talks: Building Histories
We cordially invite you to the autumn lecture series SMArt Talks, organised by the Centre for Modern Art & Theory. SMArt Talks: Building Histories start on the 23rd of September!
SMArt Talks: Embodied Modernism: Experiential Living in an Experimental House
We are delighted to invite you to the next SMArt Talks lecture of the autumn semester, which will be delivered by Robin Schuldenfrei, a Tangen Professor in 20th century modernism at The Courtauld (University of London). The lecture will take place on Wednesday, the 12th of November 2025, at the Hans Belting Library at 18:00.
Abstract
The architectural protagonists of modernism in Germany long promoted certain ideas about the spaces of modern dwelling and the kind of living and thinking that those spaces might engender. Nestled in a nearby pine grove, Walter Gropius and faculty members of the Bauhaus lived in a tightknit community of modernists. Each house or double house had an enormous, glass-walled atelier, became show houses not only for how modernism could be produced but how modern lives could simultaneously be lead, using the most up-to-date appliances and furniture. This lecture examines how the phenomenological experience of modern architecture intersects with its prevailing ideologies. It also considers the current day realities of residing inside a UNESCO World Heritage site, as the author did during a research stay in Dessau.
Professor Robin Schuldenfrei is the Tangen Professor in 20th Century Modernism at The Courtauld, University of London. She specializes in modern architectural history with a focus on materiality and the object. She is interested in broad questions – theoretical and practical – of how discourses and practices of design are shaped by a given period’s own cultural and theoretical critiques. Her research focuses on objects’ subjectivity, political agency, and social impact. Her latest book is Objects in Exile: Modern Art and Design across Borders, 1930–1960 (Princeton University Press, 2024). Previous publications include Luxury and Modernism: Architecture and the Object in Germany 1900–1933 (2018) as well as numerous articles, essays and four edited volumes, among them Iteration: Episodes in the Mediation of Art and Architecture; Atomic Dwelling: Anxiety, Domesticity, and Postwar Architecture; and, with Jeffrey Saletnik, Bauhaus Construct: Fashioning Identity, Discourse, and Modernism. She is working on a new book about the material politics of global objects.