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Department of Architecture

 

Dr. Marco Iuliano (Senior Research Associate and Research Fellow, University of Cambridge)

Nick Ray MC Lecture

Biography: Marco Iuliano is a Senior Research Associate of DIGIS (Digital Studio for Research in Design, Visualisation and Communication) and a Marie Curie Fellow in the Department of Architecture at Cambridge. His research focuses on the intersections between architecture and the visual arts. He is the recipient of several grants and awards, including the Italian CNR Fellowship (2005), the J.B. Harley Fellowship (British Library, 2008) and the Paul Mellon Centre Grant for Studies in British Art (2012). His many publications include a contribution to the History of Cartography (University of Chicago Press) and he is UK correspondent for Il Giornale dell'Architettura. Dr Iuliano has co-authored three books: the most recent, Melchior Lorck, was selected as 2010 Book of the Year in the Times Literary Supplement. He has taught Contemporary Architectural History since 2005 and is curator of the 2012 exhibition Cambridge in Concrete.

Abstract: This lecture explores the steel, brick and ferro-concrete Cambridge built in the late 50s and 60s: the almost invisible ‘Other Cambridge’, that today is not part of the identity of the city. Cambridge as a city, indeed as a University, is commonly linked to a more reassuring model in the English tradition, compressed between the noble stereotype of King’s chapel and the view from The Backs. Arcadian visions that communicate calm in the name of the arts and scholarly pursuits. But what of innovation? The aim of this talk is to stimulate a debate regarding a controversial period of architecture that is undergoing a suppression of memory and to open up to the wider public the ‘other side’ of Cambridge, often unknown and misjudged. Apart from Stirling’s Faculty of History there are many interesting buildings unknown to the general public as well as to the international scholarly community. The cues for this task are contained in the splendid images preserved in the RIBA British Architectural Library Photographs Collection that will be analysed during this seminar, which complements the exhibition Cambridge in Concrete.

Date: 
Wednesday, 9 May, 2012 - 13:15 to 14:15
Event location: 
First-floor Classroom, Department of Architecture