Imaginary Cities Speakers List

April 13th and 14th, 2007
Penn State University
State College, PA

Professors Charlotte Houghton and Daniel Purdy, co-directors

Ben Edwards

Ben Edwards is a painter who graduated from UCLA in 1992, who lives and works now in Washington, D.C. Working with digital images of suburban strip mall sprawl, which he then paints meticulously, Edwards's images re-arrange the all-too-familiar architecture into endless vistas. In addition to his participation in many group shows, he has had several solo exhibitions at the Van Doren Gallery in New York. In the coming year he will also have exhibits in Paris and Tokyo. His work can be found on his web site http://www.benjaminedwards.net.

About the image used on the conference poster, Edwards wrote:
"'Automatic City' is the first phase of a larger, ongoing project that I call Republic. While the works now on view in this exhibition begin to articulate the early formation of a generic city, there is much to this virtual place still to be explored. The empty squares around the central image on the main directory page (as well as on the Automatic City directory) are like zoned plots waiting to be filled in some ideal city: I have a general idea of what will grow there, but the specifics have yet to be built. In the coming months and years, these empty spaces will turn into more archives and more projects that will eventually feed into the center, into the paintings that will make Republic come alive."

Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and was educated at Waseda University and the University of Hamburg. She made her debut as a writer with Missing Heels, which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for new writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (which was translated by Margaret Mitsutani and published in English in 2003). She writes in both Japanese and German, and in 1996, she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award granted to foreign writers for their contribution to German culture. Where Europe Begins, a collection of stories translated from both languages by Yumi Selden and Susan Bernofsky, was published by New Directions in 2002.

Bettina Brandt

Bettina Brandt is assistant professor of German at Montclair State University. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from Harvard University and has also taught at M.I.T. and Columbia University. She has published widely on women in the avant-garde. Her current research focuses on the relation between contemporary transnational literature and surrealism.

Thomas O. Beebee

Thomas Beebee is professor of Comparative Literature and German at the Pennsylvania State University, and the editor of Comparative Literature Studies. His books include Clarissa on the Continent (1991), The Ideology of Genre (1994), and Epistolary Fiction in Europe (1999). He has written on subjects as diverse as Jesuit concepts of the Millennium, the writing of William Faulkner, and Goethe's Italiensiche Reise. He is currently at work on a book on "true imaginary places" in European and American Fiction. The title of his paper for our "Imaginary Cities" symposium is Four-Square City: The New Jerusalem as Proto-Urban Planning.

Stephen Brockmann

Stephen Brockmann is Professor of German at Carnegie Mellon University, the managing editor of The Brecht Yearbook, and serves on the Executive Committee of the German Studies Association. His most recent book, Nuremberg: The Imaginary Capital, explores the ways in which Germans from Albrecht Dürer through Richard Wagner and twentieth-century fascists have appropriated and mythologized sixteenth-century "Nuremberg" as a focus of national identity. His other publications include German Literary Culture at the Zero Hour and Literature and German Reunification.

Susan Dixon

Susan Dixon holds a BS in Architecture from Temple University, and a Ph.D. in Art History from Cornell University. She is assistant professor of Art History at the University of Tulsa. Her Between the Real and the Ideal: The Accademia degli Arcadi and its garden in eighteenth-century Rome was published by the University of Delaware Press in 2006. She has also published multiple essays on Piranesi, including "Ichnographia as Uchronia and other time warps in Piranesi's Il Campo Marzio.

John Shannon Hendrix

John Shannon Hendrix received his Ph.D. in Architecture from Cornell University. He has taught architectural history and theory at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Connecticut, and at Roger Williams University, as well as for several universities' programs in Rome, Italy. He is a prolific author. His recent books include Architecture and Psychoanalysis: Peter Eisenman and Jacques Lacan, Platonic Architectonics: Platonic Philosophies and the Visual Arts, and The Relation Between Architectural Forms and Philosophical Structures in the Work of Francesco Borromini in Seventeenth-Century Rome. He has also written on the return of allegory to architecture.

Alberto Perez-Gomez

Alberto Pérez-Gómez's numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, AA Files, Arquitecturas Bis, Section A, VIA, Architectural Design, ARQ, SKALA, A+U, Perspecta, and many other periodicals. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field. In January 1987 Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University, where he is currently Director of Post-Professional (Master's and Doctoral) Programs, and chairs the History and Theory of Architecture division. From March 1990 to June 1993, he was also the Founding Director of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research institute which he instigated, co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Université de Montréal and McGill University. Students of Dr. Pérez-Gómez now teach most Canadian architecture programs, and in many North American and European Universities.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is the author of Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press, 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture that retells the love story of the famous fifteenth century novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms, a text that has become the source of numerous projects and exhibitions. He is also co-editor of a now well-established series of books entitled CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (McGill-Queen's University Press), which collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories. A recent major book co-authored with Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge, (MIT Press, 1997), traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, with special reference to the role of projection in architectural design.

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Ph.D. (1999) in Art History, University of California Los Angeles, is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She has published on the urban and architectural history of Islamic societies. Her first book, The Image of an Ottoman City Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries, won the 2006 Spiro Kostof Award. This urban and architectural study of Aleppo, a center of early modern global trade, drew upon archival and narrative texts, architectural evidence, and contemporary theoretical discussions of the relation between imperial ideology, urban patterns and rituals, and architectural form. By viewing the urban and social contexts of these acts, tracing their evolution over two centuries, and examining their discussion in Ottoman and Arabic sources, her book proposed a new model for understanding the local reception and adaptation of imperial forms, institutions and norms.

Tom Conley

Tom Conley is Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University. He has written several important books on maps in French literature, including The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing. Cambridge Studies in French (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). He has also translated major works by Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau. Aside from his work on early modern French literature, he has written extensively on French classical cinema.

2006 - 2007 Speakers

Annabel J. Wharton

Annabel J. Wharton is the William B. Hamilton Professor of Art History at Duke University. Her work has focused on Late Antique and Byzantine art and culture, but she have also investigated the effect of modernity on the medieval past and its landscapes, first in her study of the first generation of Hilton International Hotels (Building the Cold War: Hilton International Hotels and Modern Architecture, University of Chicago Press, 2001) and most recently in a book titled Selling Jerusalem: Relics, Replics, Themeparks, University of Chicago Press, 2006). She is beginning work on a new project considering the modern recycling of pre-modern buildings. This study will document the physical, economic and political implications of contemporary appropriations of architecture and history.

Christiane Hertel

Christiane Hertel is professor of history of art at Bryn Mawr College. She teaches courses on the arts of Northern Europe, especially in Germany and the Netherlands, from the Reformation to the 20th century. Current research interests include the relationships between Rococo culture and the Enlightenment in the art, art criticism and aesthetics of 18th-century Germany; the reverberations of these relationships in German and Austrian Modernism; ornament and ornament theory; the reconstruction of 18th-century German monuments at various moments in the 20th century and in the present.

Her recent publications include:

• "Vermeer: Reception and Interpretation" (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)

• "Seven Vermeers: Collection, Reception, Response," in W. Franits, ed., A Companion to Vermeer

• "Dis/Continuities in Dresden's Dances of Death"

• "Beyond In/Autheniticity: The Case of Dresden's Frauenkirche"

2005 - 2006 Speakers

Renata Holod, Professor of Art History, University of Pennsylvania

City, Garden, World: The New Capital of Early Modern Isfahan

October 21, 2005 - Foster Auditiorium, Pattee Library - 4:00 p.m.

Robert B. McFarland, Assistant Professor, Brigham Young University

So Many Mighty Cities! Utopian Topographies in Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik (1493)

February 17, 2006 - Foster Auditorium, Pattee Library - 3:00 p.m.

Abraham Akkerman, Department of Geography, University of Saskatchewan

Thomas More's Utopia as a Precursor to the Garden City Movement

April 11, 2006 - SALA Conference Room, Stuckeman Family Building - 4:00 p.m.

April Symposium Speakers

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh

Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, Ph.D. (1999) in Art History, University of California Los Angeles, is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Davis. She has published on the urban and architectural history of Islamic societies. Her first book, The Image of an Ottoman City Imperial Architecture and Urban Experience in Aleppo in the 16th and 17th Centuries, won the 2006 Spiro Kostof Award. This urban and architectural study of Aleppo, a center of early modern global trade, drew upon archival and narrative texts, architectural evidence, and contemporary theoretical discussions of the relation between imperial ideology, urban patterns and rituals, and architectural form. By viewing the urban and social contexts of these acts, tracing their evolution over two centuries, and examining their discussion in Ottoman and Arabic sources, her book proposed a new model for understanding the local reception and adaptation of imperial forms, institutions and norms.

Denis Cosgrove

Denis Cosgrove is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles. His work has evolved from a focus on the meanings of landscape in Human and Cultural Geography, especially as these have evolved in Western Europe since the fifteenth century, to a broader concern with the role of spatial images and representations in the making and communicating of knowledge. This broad concern has been pursued through a series of focussed studies: of landscape transformation, design and images in sixteenth-century Venice and north Italy, of landscape writings by authors such as John Ruskin, of landscape, space and performance in twentieth century Rome, of cosmography in early modern Europe (1450-1650), and of the history of Western imaginings of the globe and whole earth. He has also written extensively on theory in Cultural Geography and edited for six years the journal Ecumene which publishes cross-disciplinary work on environment, culture and meaning.

Selected Publications:

Social formation and Symbolic Landscape. (2nd edition with additional introductory chapter), Wisconsin Univ. Press, 1998

The Palladian landscape: geographical change and its cultural representations in sixteenth century Italy.

"Global illumination and enlightenment in the geographies of Vincenzo Coronelli and Athanasius Kircher" in C.Withers & D.Livingstone eds. Enlightenment Geographies, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 2000, 33-66.

"Urban rhetoric and embodied identities: city, nation and empire at the Vittorio Emanuele II monument in Rome 1870-1945" (with D. Atkinson) Annals, Association of American Geographers, 88, 1, 1998, 28-49.

Apollo's canvas: a cosmographic genealogy of Western imaginings of the globe and whole earth Johns Hopkins Univ. Press (in press)

Werner Oechslin

Werner Oechslin has been full Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the ETH Zurich since 1985, and chairman of the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture from 1986 to 1998.

Born in 1944 in Einsiedeln, Switzerland, Prof. Oechslin studied art history, archaeology, philosophy and mathematics in Zurich and Rome, received his doctorate in Zurich in 1970, and was an assistant at the University of Zurich from 1971 to 1974. In 1975 and 1978 he taught at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Following qualification as a lecturer (habilitation) in Berlin in 1980, Prof. Oechslin was appointed to a professorship in Bonn, where he taught from 1980 to 1985. In 1985 he came on invitation to Geneva; subsequently he took over, as Prof. Ordinarius, the Chair of the History of Art and Architecture at the ETH Zurich, and in 1986 the chairmanship of the Institute of the History and Theory of Architecture. In 1987 he was a guest professor at Harvard University.

Prof. Oechslin has published prolifically in the area of art and architectural history from the 15th to the 20th century. The emphasis of his research and publications are studies of architectural theory, the architecture of the modern, the 18th century, and investigation of special problems of architectural drawing, architectural typology, and ephemeral architecture. In addition, Prof. Oechslin has worked on several exhibitions. He was on the editorial board of Lotus International and archithese. From 1981 to 1998 he was a coeditor of Daidalos. He is also on the board of the CCA (Montréal) and member of many scientific organisations.

Alberto Perez-Gomez

Alberto Pérez-Gómez's numerous articles have been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, AA Files, Arquitecturas Bis, Section A, VIA, Architectural Design, ARQ, SKALA, A+U, Perspecta, and many other periodicals. His first book in English, Architecture and the Crisis of Modern Science (MIT Press, 1983) won the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award in 1984, a prize awarded every two years for the most significant work of scholarship in the field.

In January 1987 Pérez-Gómez was appointed Saidye Rosner Bronfman Professor of the History of Architecture at McGill University, where he is currently Director of Post-Professional (Master's and Doctoral) Programs, and chairs the History and Theory of Architecture division. From March 1990 to June 1993, he was also the Founding Director of the Institut de recherche en histoire de l'architecture, a research institute which he instigated, co-sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Université de Montréal and McGill University. Students of Dr. Pérez-Gómez now teach most Canadian architecture programs, and in many North American and European Universities.

Dr. Pérez-Gómez is the author of Polyphilo or The Dark Forest Revisited (MIT Press, 1992), an erotic narrative/theory of architecture that retells the love story of the famous fifteenth century novel/treatise Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in late twentieth-century terms, a text that has become the source of numerous projects and exhibitions. He is also co-editor of a now well-established series of books entitled CHORA: Intervals in the Philosophy of Architecture (McGill-Queen's University Press), which collects essays exploring fundamental questions concerning the practice of architecture through its history and theories. A recent major book co-authored with Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (MIT Press, 1997), traces the history and theory of modern European architectural representation, with special reference to the role of projection in architectural design.

Tom Conley

Tom Conley is a Professor of French and Director of Graduate Studies at Harvard University. He has written several important books on maps in French literature, including The Self-Made Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) and The Graphic Unconscious in Early Modern French Writing. Cambridge Studies in French. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Pres, 1992. He has also translated major works by Gilles Deleuze and Michel de Certeau. Aside from his work on early modern French literature, he has written extensively on French classical cinema.

Yoko Tawada

Yoko Tawada was born in Tokyo in 1960 and was educated at Waseda University and the University of Hamburg. She made her debut as a writer with Missing Heels, which was awarded the Gunzo Prize for new writers in 1991. In 1993, she received the prestigious Akutagawa Prize for The Bridegroom Was a Dog (which was translated by Margaret Mitsutani and published in English in 2003). She writes in both Japanese and German, and in 1996, she won the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, a German award granted to foreign writers for their contribution to German culture. Where Europe Begins, a collection of stories translated from both languages by Yumi Selden and Susan Bernofsky, was published by New Directions in 2002.

Utopian Cities

Utopias have long been interpreted as critical alternatives to the cities of early modern Europe. The publication in 1516 of Thomas More's Utopia ( the full Latin title reads: Libellus vera aureus nec minus salutaris quam festivus de optimo reipeblicae statu deque nova Insula Utopia) brought the new literary genre into existence. The first translation was a German work published in 1524 by Claudius Catiuncula. Across the sixteenth century more translations of More's work appeared with the first English version coming into print in 1551 under the pen of Ralphe Robynson. By 1611 the word "utopia" makes it into an English dictionary. Despite its strong initial impact, the reception of More's work unfolded in stages. After More's Utopia, writers throughout Europe wrote similar novels about idealized communities which were nestled in the distant reaches beyond the known world. The reach of More's Utopia was quite long and over time the character of utopian writing expanded to include new formulations of an ideal community. Indeed, French writers took up the genre most intensely in the eighteenth century. Over eighty utopian works were written in French leading up to the Revolution. By then the genre had expanded beyond the More's humanist focus on virtue and public education to incorporate both rationalist science and geographical writings about the colonies. French utopian literature was broadly organized into three categories: imaginary republics, imaginary travel and moral adventures.

Implicit within all these novels was a critique of the political and moral organization of European cities. As many scholars have noted, a utopia presents an idealized community which is supposed to stand in sharp contrast to the reader's experience of city life. The utopia represents a possible alternative world. The fictional claim of most utopian novels is that the city depicted in the story actually does exist, for example on a distant island. Utopian literature uses its fictionality in a careful manner. It sets the idealized community in the world, but faraway, thus the utopia exists simultaneously with the everyday experiences of the reader.

Utopian literature was also allied with the expansive Renaissance discourse on city planning. As they described the internal structure and operation of their ideal cities, writers relied on the renewed scholarship on ancient Mediterranean cities begun by Alberti's treatise on architecture and extended by the Renaissance's many interpretations of one surviving Roman treatise on architecture and city planning written by Vitruvius. Architects, like novelists, composed imaginary cities which never left the paper on which they are drawn. We will connect utopian literature with the urbanism espoused by Italian architects who came after Alberti. The later, Baroque fantasies of Piranesi and Callot will be coupled with the Enlightenment ideals of Revolutionary architects such as Ledoux and Boullée. We will show how architectural theory intersected with the literature inspired by Thomas More's Utopia.

Mythological Cities

Mythological cities were treated as historical realities rather than fictional constructs. King Solomon is created with founding ancient cities in Islamic tradition. Fictional genealogies granted capitals such as Rome and Istanbul antiquity. The origins of Istanbul were traced to Solomon for similar reasons that Virgil traced Rome's foundation to the Trojan War. Byzantine legends tracing their city's origins back to the Old Testament were readily adapted by Constantinople's Turkish conquerors. The biblical story of Babel was often represented as the origin of city-building. Nimrod, the king who according to the book Genesis ordered the construction of the great tower that was supposed to reach unto the heavens, is depicted in early modern paintings with all the signs of a powerful ruler. Contrary to medieval theological expectations, the early modern Nimrod is not presented in negative terms, such as a ruler who challenges God with his construction project. Whereas paintings from the eleventh to the thirteenth century often depict God putting an end to the tower's construction, thereby emphasizing how the project sought to place man equal with God, later paintings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries take an entirely contrary approach. The Babel theme provided early modern painters the opportunity to depict the political and technological organization of a contemporary construction site. Perhaps the most famous depiction of the tower was painted by Pieter Brueghel in the middle of the sixteenth century. His two surviving paintings on the theme show in celebratory terms the relationship between Nimrod, the architect and the many laborers. Dutch and Flemish painters such as Maerten van Valckenborch, Frans Francken, Hendrick van Cleve and Lucas van Valckenborch followed Breughel's inclination to depict the vast human effort and multitude of machinery required in the sixteenth century to build a great tower. Painters in the Low countries were not the only ones to understand the Babel tower as a great and good accomplishment. At the end of the sixteenth century, the mason's guild of Nuremberg interpreted the biblical story as the origin of their own profession. Even before Brueghel's 1563 painting, Renaissance scholars read the Babel story as wondrous accomplishment. In 1430, when Cardinal Orsini commissioned 300 frescos of famous men for the palace at Monte Giodano in Rome, Nimrod and his Tower were included along with the many prophets, lawgivers and princes included.

The Greek world also provided myths concerning the founding of cities. Perhaps the most famous ancient story involved the architect Deinokrates who designed an ideal city for Alexander nestled on Mount Athos which would in turn he hoped would be transformed into a giant sculpture of the Macedonian ruler. Famously, Alexander rejects the idea as impractical but offers a position to Deinokrates in his court. Classically trained architects, well versed in Vitruvius and Pliny, have interpreted the story as an allegory depicting the relations between ruler and architect, as well as a cautionary tale about the basic requirements for founding a city. As is appropriate with such an ancient and unconformable tale, each re-telling gives a different emphasis and a different lesson.

The City of Brass described in the Arabian Nights collection has been read by non-muslin scholars as an allegory reflecting on the status of story telling, political exploration as well as sexual relations. In many of these readings, the City of Brass embodies the satisfaction of desires. It stands empty in the desert as the secret in plain sight, available to travelers who understand the path into its center. We will compare the treasures that the City of Brass holds forth to the idealized communal relations of the European utopia.

The interdependence of utopian literature and mythical histories of ancient cities can also be see when we consider Virgil's Aeniad as a source for More and others, for it combines the two strands that join utopian with mythical accounts of cities' founding. The epic recounts a dangerous sea voyage to found a new ideal city on a distant shore, that this tale is also presents itself as the history of Rome's founding makes clear how closely connected the early modern utopia was to imperial mythology. We are as interested in early modern representations of Troy as they connect with works such as More's Utopia.