Conversations Across Architectural History
Symposium
Setting the Table: Conversations Across Architectural History gathers research from the 2024/25 cohort of the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Architectural History MA programme to consider how architecture is shaped by intersecting systems and practices — policy, security, coloniality and decoloniality, labour, sensing, destruction, repair, and representation. Rather than isolating buildings as autonomous objects, the projects within treat these forces as co-authors of the built environment and its histories.
The table is a space of interaction. In the accompanying exhibition, its surfaces are ‘set’ with ideas and artefacts — photographs, documents, models, films, and ephemera — so visitors can serve themselves, compare approaches, and assemble their own routes through existing material. In recalling the seminar setting as a place to gather, question, and exchange, the surrounding displays reveal the production of research around a common centre. Here, the table serves as both prompt and invitation, calling us to look closely and think together.
The book carries forward this invitation, unfolding across four sections — Situated Agencies, Behind the Glass, Edge Habitats, and Next Passages — each staging its own conversation whilst reflecting a shared commitment to architectural history as a situated, collaborative practice.