Archiving Architecture, w. Lucy Benjamin

Photograph of Richard Serra's Tilted Arc

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Wednesday 27 May 2026, 5:30pm-6:30pm
Macmahon Ball Theatre, Old Arts
University of Melbourne, Parkville campus

Abstract:
The aim of this talk is to explore the possibility of memorialising housing under conditions of demolition. Over fifty buildings are demolished in Australia every day, lacking either the formal protection of heritage listing or the possibility of resurrection through disassembly and reconstruction. And yet, the memorialisation of buildings is not a straightforward process. In antiquity, the extraction of architectural elements, known as spolia, was linked to the vandalism of war, a process that has assumed the more recent shorthand ‘Elginism,’ so named after the disputed removal of the Parthenon Marbles by Lord Elgin in the early 19th century. More contemporary attempts to memorialise housing, as in Rachel Whiteread’s 1993 project, House, a concrete cast of a Victorian terrace in London’s East End, have dramatized the voids left by housing demolition, and yet without necessarily relaying the impact of demolition on already marginalised communities. In a similar fashion and echoing Richard Serra’s declaration that to remove his site-specific artwork Tilted Arc (1981-1989) was to destroy it, recent attempts to salvage architectural works have been accused of neutralising the processes that led to their demolition. How then to remember these artefacts?

Speaker bio:
Lucy Benjamin is a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Much of her research explores the work of Hannah Arendt and this talk builds on sections from her forthcoming book Architecture after Arendt.