 Good morning. I'm Ashley West, Director of Graduate Studies and Art History at Temple University. And on behalf of my colleagues among the Temple Art History faculty and our graduate cohort, and as the host institution this year with the Barnes, I want to welcome you all to the 27th Annual Graduate Symposium in the History of Art. Today we can look forward to an exciting day of talks by graduate students representing eight programs across the Mid-Atlantic region and presenting current research in art history. And before we proceed further, I do want to acknowledge that the land on which we gather here today is Lenape Hoking, the ancestral land of the Lenape Nation. We pay respect and honor to the caretakers of this land from time immemorial until now and into the future. This land acknowledgement is one small act in the ongoing process of working to be in a good relationship with the land and the people of the land. So, welcome back. After hopefully many of you heard our wonderful keynote yesterday, Evening Blind Voice Migratory Gesture by Professor Jennifer Gonzalez, who spoke poetically about contemporary artists whose work engages the geopolitics of migration through expressions of textuality, erasure, and forms of silent orality. In the wake of her talk last night, I couldn't help but think solemnly about one tragic cause of migration and erasure very much in the news today. And that is the Russian War Against Ukraine, launched exactly a year ago, though of course Ukrainians would remind us rightly so that it's actually been about nine years since the invasion of Crimea. I also want to pay respects to Officer Christopher Fitzgerald, whose loss is also marked by this day. But I do want to strike an uplifting tone and put our attention today on our graduate students to celebrate them and their professionalism, their intellects, their ideas, and to honor the relationship of advisor and advisor grad student that adds something immeasurable to the human experience of this peculiar academic life that we live. And in fact, you will hear each speaker introduced by their faculty mentor today for that reason. Today's event is a sampling of that sentiment about the need to support our graduate students. I want to thank Martha Lucy, Alia Palumbo, and the entire Barnes team for once again putting together a great program and lovely set of activities and meals for our speakers and their advisors. Alia is a total star and makes all of this look easy, even though I know it's not. And I know there must also be quite some tech team at work behind the scenes with this dual sort of in-person live streaming, which they managed to sync up smoothly. Against the background of the Barnes, which is celebrating their 100 years this year, I find it rather fitting that our sessions today are not structured by chronology or any single narrative of modernity or value, for example, but rather by other affinities that demand our close attention and that encourage conversations across various temporalities and geographies. In fact, I sent some interesting connections to be made in our panel discussions as we hear about architecture, porcelain paintings, drawings, photo montages, embroidery. And as we travel from ancient Iraq to the Soviet Union, Baroque Germany to 19th century India to South Africa. So let's get started. Thank you. Thank you, Ashley, and welcome everybody. I'm Martha Lucy, Deputy Director for Research and Education here. Where did she go? That is such a great point that you just made about the sessions kind of mirroring the installation of the collection and the kind of cross. I wish I could say that it was intentional, but. So we do love hosting this and we inherited this from the PMA. This is our seventh year doing it. We look forward to it every year and we really like to think of this as a true partnership with our co-organizing institutions. This year, the lead was Temple and with just the academic community in general, you know, we're more than just a venue for this thing. Although I am told by David Brownlee that we have really good smelling auditorium seats. So we, you know, it's just, it's such a nice opportunity for us for, for, for me and my colleagues here at the barns to meet students to connect with their mentors to spend time in the galleries to spend time talking at dinner and to hear about all the new work that keeps the field moving forward. And this, this newness and this vitality is especially important to us at the barns, because as many of you know, this institution has not always been open to new ways of looking at art. And so I'm really proud to say that over the past 20 years, we've become an institution that is, is has moved from being kind of frozen in the past to actively bringing in new voices and new methodologies to produce new knowledge about our own collections and our colleagues in the academic community in this area have been essential to that project. So thank you to all the students and to all their advisors for being here today. Thank you to our co organizing institutions, Temple University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Maher and to the faculty members on the organizing committee, especially Ashley West. Thank you to Jennifer Gonzalez for such a wonderful talk last night and for coming all the way through a storm to be here with us. Thank you to the other moderators today. We have Cindy Kang will be joining us. She is our associate curator and Corinne Chong is our assistant curator. They're going to chair a couple of sessions. Our AV team is the best. And Aliyah. I mean, Ashley, you said it, she makes it look easy, but there is so much that goes into this. Thank you, Aliyah, as always. Our first session today has had three really interesting papers, one of which deals with the political meanings of garden imagery in the Neo Assyrian Empire. Then we move into urban design and post apartheid Johannesburg and then into the status of architecture in mid 19th century Britain. I will now turn it over to Marion Feldman, Professor of the history of art and Near Eastern Studies at Johns Hopkins University to introduce her student, our first speaker Bianca Hand. Thank you. Good morning. I'm delighted to introduce Bianca Hand as the first speaker of the symposium. Bianca is completing her dissertation on ancient Assyrian art in the history of art department at Johns Hopkins University. She received her BA from the College of Worcester in Ohio, where she majored in archaeology and minored in art history and French before joining the PhD program at Hopkins in 2017. In 2021-2022, Bianca was the Henry S. Blackwood pre-doctoral fellow in the ancient Near Eastern department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And she is currently a two year Idlestone fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, where she will be in residence next academic year. Bianca has participated in excavations in Cyprus and Turkey, including working on a reconstruction project at the site of Tel Tayanot in the Hatay province, an area that is currently suffering tremendously from the devastation of the earthquakes in southeastern Turkey. And I do want to take a moment here to acknowledge the suffering and the resilience of the communities in that part of the world. She has also participated in the Center for Curatorial Leadership's Mellon Foundation seminar in curatorial practice, and in spring 2021 was inducted into the Johns Hopkins chapter of the National Boucher Graduate Honor Society. Bianca's dissertation, of which you will hear a part of today, challenges previous scholarly perspectives on alterity in the royal art of the Assyrian Empire through a critical analysis of the palace built by Sargon II at his new capital at Kursabad at the end of the 8th century BCE. In her study, Bianca proposes that images and materializations of the other destabilized the dominant Assyrian ideology, and that the Assyrians themselves were reacting in their artistic programs to a paradoxical coexistence by which their vast empire depended upon, indeed was built because of the other, and yet was threatened by the potential power that this afforded subaltern entities. Pushing back against the ancient Assyrian propaganda, Bianca's project insists on subaltern agency and resistance to dominant ideological narratives. In this way, it promises to make a major contribution to both ancient art history and alterity studies. Bianca. Thank you, Marion, for your kind introduction, and thank you to the Barnes Foundation for hosting this event. On a personal note, before I begin today's talk, I want to express my solidarity with Temple University's Graduate Student Association, who are currently on strike to fight for a living wage, improved benefits, and a more equitable working environment to teach, learn, and research. I wish them the best of luck in advocating for a fair contract with Temple University. Studies of alterity and Neo-Assyrian art often begin and end with discussions pertaining to the presence of foreign peoples depicted in relation to Assyrians. In my dissertation, I examined the figural other, that is, figures other than royal or elite male Assyrians, to illuminate the subversive role of alterity within the Relief Program of the Royal Palisade Corsabod. The study also includes representations of flora, fauna, and architecture, which I refer to as the non-human other. Today, my talk will focus on the barber leaves of a garden scene in Room 7 of King Sargon II's Royal Palisade Corsabod, the earliest extant depiction of a Neo-Assyrian royal garden. I analyzed Room 7 to argue that the non-human other has the same potential to challenge the intended ideological message in Neo-Assyrian royal art as representations of foreign peoples. Furthermore, I posit that gardens transition into a political role through the inclusion of the non-human other in its landscape, but also that additional details such as the room's physical position, presence of the divine, and the lack of foreign figures draw telling visual parallels with Neo-Assyrian periphery monuments that help elucidate the role of Room 7 as the ideological center of empire at Corsabod. I will end today's paper by exploring the subversive effect of this reliance on the non-human other in the Relief Program of Room 7. The Royal Palisade Corsabod is singular among Assyrian palaces in its limited history of use. Sargon II relocated the capital of the Neo-Assyrian Empire from Nimrud to build a new city and royal palace at Corsabod. Construction of the new city began in 717 BCE and was officially inaugurated in 706 BCE. Decorating the walls of the palace were carved orthostat reliefs, the best preserved of which were found in the northwest quadrant of the palace, highlighted on the floor plan in red. This presentation focuses on this area of the palace and will primarily use line drawings for clarity due to the state of preservation of the reliefs. Soon after the palace was inaugurated, Sargon died in battle in 705 BCE and his body was never recovered. Fearing this was an act of retribution by the gods, Sargon's son Sennacherib abandoned Corsabod and moved the capital to the ancient city of Nineveh. Because of this, the Royal Palisade Corsabod had approximately 11 years during which it was built and briefly occupied. Given that most Neo-Assyrian palaces were occupied for generations, the Royal Palisade Corsabod presents a rare opportunity to investigate a palace that was constructed, decorated, and had input from only a single Neo-Assyrian king. Due to its size and spatial orientation, Room 7 has few parallels in Neo-Assyrian palatial architecture. The room is roughly at the center of the northwest quadrant of the Royal Palace where the king would have resided and conducted business. The room's walls were decorated with a double registered relief program carved on stone orthostat slabs. The upper register depicts a banquet scene while the lower register depicts a garden scene in which the king and his men hunt. The room's purpose may still be enigmatic, its size, single entrance, and the subject matter of its relief program hint at a room used for more intimate, potentially celebratory events. Historically, the themes of the room's relief program, banqueting and hunting, were practiced after successful military campaigns and were thus associated with moments of celebration. As Irene Winter has argued, banqueting was an important way for rulers to perform sociality and ideology, a way to communicate at once power, abundance, generosity, and the rhetorical success of both ruler and polity. Public hunting events during which the king and his men hunted gazelles, bulls, and even lions also communicated a similar message of power over the natural environment with additional ritual components as well. These staged events allowed the king to demonstrate his prowess as a hunter and protector of the empire and its citizens. Keeping the celebratory nature of banqueting and hunting in mind, it is fitting that Sargon is accompanied by his soldiers as he rides through his garden in room 7. Textual and potential iconographic evidence dating to the reign of Sargon II suggests an increasing desire to signal the breadth of the empire's borders through the inclusion of exotic plants and animals in the gardens and game reserves. In fact, the earliest evidence of plants offered as tribute to a near-Azerian king can be found on an ivory plaque dating to between the 8th and 7th century BCE. Moreover, before Sargon's reign, as Donald Wiseman notes, textual descriptions of royal gardens exhibited no stylization beyond terracing, and even then only gardens explicitly tied to the temple or palace were planned with attention to appearance, shade, fragrance, etc. This is not to say that previous palatial gardens were not created with multiple layers of meaning in mind, but to emphasize their growing political and symbolic role during the reign of Sargon II. A shift in terminology found during the reigns of Sargon II and his son Sennacherib suggests an additional grandeur associated with these increasingly composite spaces. Alongside the term for garden Kiru in Akkadian, the term Kirimahu, or great mighty garden, came into use as well, suggesting an elevated significance that cannot be encapsulated by simply referring to these spaces as gardens in contemporaneous sources. Thus, the presence of soldiers within Sargon's retinue in Room 7 speaks not only to the growing political and symbolic importance of gardens, but also to the presence of embedded references to recently conquered or contested foreign landscapes in which Sargon conducted military campaigns during the early years of his reign. Scholars have argued that Sargon, the son of Tiglok's palazer III, likely usurped the throne from his brother, Shalmaneser V, just a few years after the former king ascended to the throne. This power transfer was so disruptive that it warranted a move of the capital city to a new but otherwise unremarkable location. This suggests a need to distance the newly reigning king from the previous existing power structures in the capital city of Nimrod. Sargon then spent much of his reign quelling insurrections within Assyria and revolts in surrounding regions by those who attempted to exploit this period of internal struggle. Sargon was relatively successful in his endeavors. Around 720 BCE, he re-established control over the Levantine region of Samaria, of which Venetia is a close neighbor, expanded the empire further into the Sierra Anatolian region, including conquering Car Commission 717 BCE, and resoundingly defeated Urvartu in 714 BCE. I argue below that these regions are cited in Room 7 as a testament to and celebration of Sargon's military achievements. The Levant is referenced in Room 7 by the inclusion of two Phoenician style boats reminiscent of those used in a seascape scene elsewhere in the palace, where figures are shown bringing wood from as scholars have argued the Mediterranean coast. Sargon cites the source of inspiration for his contemporaneous royal gardens as the Sierra Anatolian region, which is mentioned in Sargon's bull Colossae inscription carved between the legs of a patrapeic winged deities called Lemassu that were placed at every major doorway in the palace. The text, which is part of a longer inscription detailing the construction of the city, states that he created around the royal palace a botanical garden, a replica of Mount Amanus, in which were gathered every kind of aromatic plant from the land of Hati and every type of fruit-bearing mountain tree. Neo-Assyrian textual sources use the phrase land of Hati as an all-encompassing term for the regions of northern Syria and Anatolia, or what I will refer to today as the Sierra Anatolian region. The latter portion of Sargon's statement is also attested in letters from his officials located at various sites in the Sierra Anatolian region, which detail a plethora of plants that were imported, such as apple, pomegranate, medlar, almond, quince, plum, cedar, and cypress trees, some of which appear in Sargon's Room 7 garden scene. This land of Hati is also signaled in Room 7 by the inclusion of a falcon that rests on the horse of an Assyrian soldier on slaps 4 and 5. Genie can be noted that falconry was an elite Sierra Anatolian sport adopted by the Assyrians, possibly around the 2nd millennium BCE. In addition, the Portico building on slaps 12 and 13 may be a Beat Halani, a term found only in Assyrian sources to describe an elusive architectural style that has yet to be securely defined, but which was ascribed to the Sierra Anatolian region by the Assyrians. The Beat Halani style is associated with architectural features such as columns on distinct bases, a wide porch, and a long set of stairs. Thus, both overt and subtle aspects of the landscape and symbols of royal power and kingship of the Sierra Anatolian region have been spread throughout the room's garden scene. The object resting on the hill admits the trees and birds remains enigmatic. Scholars have suggested that it is either an altar or incense burner, though it could be both simultaneously. A few extant Neo Assyrian parallels resemble this object, such as these two presented here, one of which was excavated near Shrine in Nineveh and dates to between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, the other unfortunately found in an unknown context. However, the monument found in Room 7 also closely resembles a type of Sero-Anatolian mortuary stelae, primarily found at Karkamish, dating to the 8th century. Not only do the monuments have similar accranolation on their tops, but the altar or incense burner in Room 7 has a rectangular section delineated in the same location where text is found on the monument from Karkamish. As mentioned above, Sargon conquered Karkamish in 717 BCE, the same year construction on the royal palace at Korsabod began. This victory was the culmination of centuries of conflict between the two regions and may have been commemorated by displaying this type of Sero-Anatolian mortuary monument as booty in Room 7. Room 7's garden scene reinforces Sargon's prowess as a ruler through a careful citational representation of the king's recent military triumphs through a claim on not only the landscape of these regions, but occasionally through their symbols of power as well. Room 7 is also a microcosm of a long-standing Assyrian tradition of symbolically laying claim to foreign landscapes. During the Neo Assyrian period, this was most notably done through the erection of periphery monuments. Prefery monuments were highly stylized images of the king, often erected as delays or carved into foreign landscapes. They were consistently inscribed with the king's deeds and military victories, often the same events that led to the erection of the monuments themselves. The monuments were often placed in previously established symbolically charged locations, like on rock faces and near waterways, often making them difficult or dangerous to access. Regardless of their visibility and accessibility, the presence of these monuments was a means to symbolically lay claim to the region, its surrounding landscape, and, when present, its natural resources. Prefery monuments were a manifestation of multiple layers of Assyrian power and tradition and were the recipients of ritual activity in order for them to be activated, as ideologically charged images of the king. Scholars like Ann Schaefer have argued that these monuments received ritual activity when erected within the landscape, citing conquest summary texts describing such activity. These conquest summary texts may have guided future kings to these locations in order for them to perform necessary rituals to keep the monuments active and, in addition, to symbolizing the extent of the king's continued control over peripheral landscapes. Through this activation, these monuments were transformed into the symbolic presence of the king, connecting these monuments to the center of empire, or the symbolic and ideological seat of power of the Assyrian empire, often associated with the capital city. Whereas periphery monuments transported the king into conquered regions to lay claim to its landscape and natural resources, Room 7 imports a composite foreign landscape into the center of empire itself. Viewing Room 7 through the lens of this reversal illuminates many other significant aspects of the room's details and spatial orientation. Room 7's relief program and physical position within the palace evoke the same principal impetuses for the erection of a periphery monument, placing reliefs in a location of restricted access. Within foreign landscapes, the empire controls or seeks to control, and the ritual activity needed to activate the monument. These similarities suggest that Room 7 is the center of empire at Korsabad. As mentioned previously, Room 7 has a single entrance that can only be accessed through Room 4. Moreover, the single entrance also aligns with the exit from Room 4 onto the palace terrace, suggesting an exclusivity of access to Room 7 and an additional connection to the landscape beyond. The landscape created in the garden scene in Room 7 is an amalgamation of references to the Siro Anatolian region, the Levant and possibly even Aratu, essentially recently conquered and or politically contentious landscapes. Given that the palace terrace at Korsabad was built on a raised platform against and above the city walls, one may have been able to indeed view the landscape around the palace. Perhaps even the garden resembling Mount Amanus that Sargon claims to have been created around the palace in his Lamassu inscription mentioned earlier. Furthermore, the cyclical nature of the relief program itself evokes the concept of repetition as a symbol of demonstrating abundance. An artistic device demonstrated as far back as the third millennium BCE, most notably seen on the Aruk face. Furthermore, spread throughout Room 7 are symbols that I suggest represent the presence of the divine. On Slab 7 and 8, an Assyrian eunuch, identified by his lack of beard, shoots an arrow past a standard in the shape of a rosette. During the Neo-Assyrian period, rosettes were also seen as the star of Ishtar, the goddess who is associated with war, love and political power. The remains of a roundel with what seems to be the tail and rear of a bull or a lion is also partially visible to the left. The storm god Adad, associated with bulls, was also referred to as the Lord of Abundance, given that it was through his will that a successful harvest could occur. The animal could also be a lion, which would be another reference to the goddess Ishtar. Lastly, the falcon referenced earlier could also allude to the presence of an unknown god depicted with the head of a falcon on military standards during the reign of Sargon II. Given the verdant, lush nature of the garden, the suggested presence of the gods Ishtar and Adad could allude to both the positive nature of the king's relationship with the divine, and a divine sanctioning of Sargon, his reign, and his military actions as king. Room 7's placement in roughly the center of the quadrant spatially situates it as the center of empire. The rooms surrounding Room 7 contain depictions of successful military campaigns and the subjugation of foreign figures. In the first chapter of my dissertation, I consider these scenes of subjugation juxtaposed with the scenes of dutiful procession scenes elsewhere in the palace to be indicative of an anxiety of the other and the threat of the rebellion against the empire. In short, the repetition of procession scenes and reminders of the consequences of rebellion paradoxically reveals an anxiety of the threat of rebellion. Room 7 is not just void of non-Assyrian figures then, but surrounded by rooms in which they are actively being subjugated and conquered. This not only reiterates the triumphal nature of Room 7, but also symbolically eliminates the threat of the human other before the space is even entered. Room 7 has essentially been purified of the threat of the human other, both in their exclusion within the space and their subjugation outside of it. Thus, Room 7 plays two intrinsically linked, simultaneously occurring roles within the royal palace at Korsabad. As a center of empire, Room 7 has been surrounded by depictions of warfare, conquered landscapes and subjugated foreign peoples, detailing said military triumphs. Within the room, the depicted garden scene creates a foreign composite landscape that has brought the periphery into the heart of the empire. The room represents the success of Sargon's reign and a symbolic connection to the landscapes the empires recently defeated. Through this strategic use of iconography, Room 7's garden scene presents a representational summary of Sargon's military victories, celebrated with a banquet in the register above. However, even without the depictions of foreign people in the relief program, the non-human other plants, animals and architecture reveals an inextricable reliance on the visual forms of the other to construct this ritually significant space. Their presence illuminates an inherent contradiction within the new Assyrian ideological worldview. These gardens in their display of abundance and control of the other could not function in this capacity without the presence and active contribution of the other in the creation of this space. Thank you. Hello and good morning and let me add my thanks to the thanks you've, we've already heard to our colleagues here at the Barnes and to the, those from the other sponsoring institutions from Bryn Mawr and Temple. Thanks to, thanks to Ashley and thanks to Martha particularly. My name is David Brownlee. I'm an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and it's my very great pleasure to introduce my dissertation advisor, Stephanie Gibson. Stephanie is a Bermudian and I say just to start out, she's the first graduate student I've ever had with whom I could discuss sailing at the, at the level at which I would joyfully do it every day. Stephanie studied art history as an undergraduate at Emory. She came to Penn with many interests and studied widely in our curriculum. She wrote her MA paper on Winslow Homer's depictions of Bermuda and then studied, did her minor field, her second field in African American art. In a wide range of activities, presenting papers at conferences and doing curatorial work. Some of the highlights of this include her, her curation of an exhibition called Things Unseen at the Bermuda Society of Arts, a variety of other projects at art institutions in Bermuda and working as a contributor to the Extraordinary Monument Lab project here in Philadelphia. The dissertation from which, from which Stephanie will choose to present one part, one chapter of the work today. Stephanie's dissertation is a consideration of four monumental sites of the trauma of the African diaspora. This was a project that had to be re-engineered in the early days of the pandemic when travel was difficult. And the final list of the four case studies include the, include the constitutional court in Johannesburg, which is the, which is the topic that she will take up today. The so-called Maison des Esclaves in Dakar, Senegal, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama and Eastern State Penitentiary here in Philadelphia. And you can probably guess that the fourth topic was one that was added to this project, to this dissertation project when it became impossible to travel elsewhere. But Stephanie has been to Senegal and to South Africa and brings to this, to this consideration of these monuments an unusually direct and compelling encounter with the resources available only in those sites. The project, her interpretation of these works exists on several planes. Perhaps most simply and fundamentally, her work examines the methods used by those who commissioned the sites and those who designed them to serve and to transform a public. To identify the method, to experiment in many respects with the methodologies needed to heal and to transform. These are monuments that in every, I think, usual sense are not simply monuments. They are not simply of the past. They are rooted in an activist spirit towards the present and a hopeful spirit towards the future. They are not symbols. They are not merely involved with symbolism. They are involved with agency. And I see images flickering on my screen continuously here. I hope there's nothing disturbing up there. I end with a happy piece of news and that is that Stephanie, who is now completing her dissertation, will take up a position as an assistant professor of Africana Art at Holland's University in the fall. And with that happy note, I introduce Stephanie. Thank you for that extremely generous introduction, David. I also would like to echo that I stand in solidarity with the graduate students of Temple University who are in strike seeking fair pay and benefits. I invite the audience to learn more about the Temple University Graduate Student Association strike because their fight is ours as well. I have reached closure. I look at this place as a beacon in hope. Activist, educator, and community organizer Joyce Paloso-Saroke professed when she led a journalist on a tour of her workplace on Constitution Hill in the South African city of Johannesburg. For Saroke, Constitution Hill is more than a place of employment. During apartheid, it was a place where she spent six months in prison in solitary confinement. Like many South Africans who protested the brutal apartheid regime or merely violated past laws, the laws that restricted the movement of people of color, Saroke spent time behind bars in one of the many prisons that once occupied this site. Behind these walls, prisoners were subjected to an array of physical, emotional, and dehumanizing punishment. Because the nature of apartheid essentially criminalized the existence of people of color, almost every black family in Johannesburg and even across the country has some memory of the prison complex now called Constitution Hill. Looking over the impoverished neighborhood of Hillbrow, the prison complex stood as a symbol of oppression. How is such a site that once ripped away the freedom of so many people come to represent not only closure but hope for Ms. Saroke and so many people like her? This talk, which is derived from a chapter of my dissertation, demonstrates how Constitution Hill was transformed from an apartheid-era prison to an urban public space that does two things. One, it memorializes the anti-apartheid struggle, and two, and I argue the more powerful aspect, it reconfigures urban space in order to subvert the apartheid-urban spatial design. The precinct was constructed between 2001 and 2004 through a partnership between Elm Design Workshop led by Yenina Matajota and Andrew Macon and Urban Solutions led by Paul Weigers. The architects were awarded the commission after an international two-stage competition. Commissioned through a partnership of the Constitutional Court and the Greater Johannesburg Metropolitan Council, the precinct was intended to illustrate South African's journey from, quote, a racist authoritarian society to an open constitution of democracy, end quote. Constitution Hill, a former apartheid prison site turned human rights precinct is designed in a way that leverages its history and its location between the impoverished, mostly black neighborhood of Hillbrow and the middle class cultural neighborhood of Brown Frontaine as a way to function as a daily site of memory. By designing a Constitutional Court precinct that enables daily pedestrian usage, the architects constructed a space that consistently reminds the users of the atrocities of apartheid and subverts the structure of the apartheid city in an attempt to help South Africans to walk through, or as I say, to work through, sorry, or as I say, walk through the past. Apartheid at its core was an inherently spatial system. The racist political system implemented by the Africans Nationalist Party, the government South Africa from 1946 to 1991 is roughly translated in English as a partners. As its name suggests, it dedicated a system of separate development among the four official classified racial groups. White, black, Asian and colored. These law enforced segregated housing and public facilities implemented separate education education standards suppressed non white labor unions restricted the movement of non whites into white areas and denied non white political participation in holding government positions. Those who voiced a dissent against apartheid regime face repercussions through incarceration or worse. One of the most infamous examples of the brutality of the apartheid state was their response to the 1976 student protests in Soweto, which resulted in 176 deaths and 1000 injured. Under apartheid, the separation of races was legislated in every aspect of life in an attempt to maintain white control of the economic and legislative levers of power. It dictated what schools a person could attend, and ultimately, who one could marry. In order to function as intended, apartheid required what Sarah Nuttall and Ashile Mbembe call a spatial framing of race, the created zones in which the various races lived, socialized and worked. For example, laws such as the group areas act legislated where the various races could live and work. This act banned the mixing of races in areas of both living and employment, unless an exemption was granted. The quest for racial separation culminated in the creation of the infamous townships via the natives resettlement act. That displaced 60,000 black Africans from their homes in Johannesburg city center and resettled them in areas far outside the town limits, all with the purpose of, quote, restoration of the western areas to their rightful owners. Resistance of removal resulted in countless arrests and the threat of more severe punishment. The removal of residents of Johannesburg was followed by the subsequent removal of tens of thousands of black and Indian people across South Africa and the closure of hundreds of businesses. The creation and enforcement of such legislation resulted in an urban landscape that both reflected and reinforced the system of apartheid. Because apartheid was an inherently spatial structural system, its influence can still be seen throughout the South African urban landscape. The result was a necessarily fragmented urban landscape with white South Africans living in the city center and black Indian and colored South Africans living on the outskirts, ensuring that it was virtually impossible for non-white South Africans to move throughout the city. In cities such as Johannesburg, the spatial framing of race was upheld through the apartheid urban spatial system which used various forms of natural and man-made barriers to separate the races. Apartheid was so pernicious that physical boundaries or buffer strips were leveraged or constructed to delineate the separation of the races. For example, the well-known township of Soweto is visually and physically separated from the rest of Johannesburg by a mountain. Township cannot see or be seen by the rest of the city. The spatial fragmentation is immovable and unenviable to dismantle, proving the insidious nature of the apartheid urban plan. However, this does not negate the present-day efforts by activists and urban designers to address the physical legacy of apartheid urban design in Johannesburg. The specter of apartheid still haunts the present urban landscape, the ghosts of which on-design and urban solutions are trying to rest through the design and construction of Constitution Hill. As Maurice Hall blocks the father of collective memory asserts, every collective memory unfolds within a spatial framework. In South Africa, the legacy of apartheid is filled with trauma and pain and visible in its spatial design. The ideology of apartheid was entrenched within the spatial fabric of South African society for almost half a century and shaped the country's collective memory. The universality of experiences at Constitution Hill makes the prison complex an important site of memory for those who were traumatized by the harsh reality of South African apartheid. For non-Mite South Africans, the memory of apartheid unfolded within the space of the townships in the apartheid prisons, like those on Constitution Hill. The spaces in which the ideology of apartheid was continuously reinforced, reinscribed, and reproduced. Unfortunately, not all South Africans are fond of the idea of commemorating a place which represents that horror's experience under apartheid. Some White South Africans would prefer to forget and move on from the past. Spilling on the trauma of the past, they argue, only leads to more division and does nothing to move the country forward. A sentiment that was heralded by former apartheid era president Frederick Wilhelm de Klerk, who advocated for a form of, quote, reconciliation that was about putting the past behind us and focusing on a common future, end quote. This urge to move on from a dark past, without addressing the pain of the past, lends itself to a comparison of the denotification efforts of post-war Germany. Theodor Adorno warned against the urge to move on from the past in his 1959 speech entitled, Vaspidautet auf arbeiten der Vergangenheit. In his speech, Adorno argues against the German public's embrace of auf arbeiten. Though the term was purported as a way to work through the country's fascist past, it more so amounted to, quote, the intention to close the books on the past, end quote. Germans of post-war Germany, just like South Africans of post-apartheid South Africa, were more interested in moving on from the past and looking towards the future. It did not want to be made to feel guilty for the horrors that were perpetuated under the fascist regime. As a result, the structures that allowed fascism to flourish remained because the actual root causes of fascism were never addressed. Instead, Adorno called for Vergangenheit der Arbeitung, or an overcoming of the past or mastering the past. Overcoming or processing the past demands self-reflection and understanding of the mechanisms that allowed for the Holocaust to happen and the willingness to address and eradicate fascism directly. It was only by staring the ugliness that happened in the face and seeking out a way to fix it that society is able to deal with its troubled history. Adorno continues his argument by asserting that we are doomed to repeat the past if we do not master the past. Like the effort of denotification in Germany, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa did not address the core issues of apartheid. This is not the democracy we were promised. Constitution Hill activist, archivist David Magagula asserted after we discussed South African history, politics, and current affairs one afternoon. The foundations of apartheid were never truly addressed, he added. I sat silently, allowing his words to wash over me, the weight and the consequence of them. After decades of struggle, hope, and yearning for freedom, the reality of democracy did not live up to expectations. Youth unemployment was among the highest in the world, crime and corruption are a part of daily life, and the income inequality gap continues to grow. Attending to the past in South Africa would mean addressing the many structural systems that remain from apartheid, one of them being the apartheid spatial system and memorializing the struggle against white supremacy. Elm design and urban solutions provide an opportunity to deal with the past with the urban design of Constitution Hill by providing an alternative to the apartheid urban spatial system and by turning the notorious awaiting trial block into a monument to the anti-apartheid struggle. As a means to combat this, Elm design and urban solutions developed what they call an urban spatial system that would correct the distorted spatial pattern of the apartheid city by reversing separation and regional benefits from a local area development vision. This urban spatial system is in contrast to the apartheid urban spatial system as it prioritizes accessibility and encourages the mixing of people from various races and backgrounds. The urban spatial system achieved this by organizing the formal prison site in ways that privileged the pedestrian made connections between Hillbrow and Bromfontein and created a public open space network. Together, the elements of the urban spatial system create an urban space whose purpose is to upset the legacy of apartheid. The urban spatial system of Constitution Hill offers a space in which the pedestrian is privileged, something that is unheard of in a city and country that is largely inaccessible to pedestrians. You can see the pedestrian walkways highlighted in blue and purple here. Constitution Hill offers a reprieve from the busy streets that surround it and provides a safe space for people who traverse the city almost entirely on foot. Urban solutions does so by providing multiple points of entry that privilege the pedestrian. While there are only two entryways for cars, there are four points of entry for pedestrians. The multiple pedestrian entrances make the space easily accessible to residents of both the surrounding neighborhoods. The precinct is completely open, creating both a clear visual line between Hillbrow and Bromfontein and communicating to passersby that the space is public and encouraging daily use. Multiple entrances make the site accessible and feel open to the public while also providing the ability to control foot traffic. The flow of foot traffic is guided through essentially one central pathway despite the scattered entrances. The purpose of creating connections to and through Hillbrow and Bromfontein is to ensure access for all. Under apartheid, certain areas of the city were made completely inaccessible both legally and structurally to non-white people. If one spends even a short amount of time at the precinct, they will see people constantly using the space to traverse between the two neighborhoods to get to and from work or to venture into the neighborhood of Bromfontein to shop or eat. In constant distinction to the apartheid urban policy, own design and urban solutions intentionally encourage mingling between the economically and racially desperate neighborhoods. By creating a connection between the impoverished neighborhood of Hillbrow and the wealthier neighborhood of Bromfontein, the architects of Constitution Hill grant access to areas that were previously inaccessible both legally and structurally to black South Africans. This effort to connect the two neighborhoods strikes at one of the legacies of apartheid, the continued inability to navigate cities on foot. The second goal of Constitution Hill's urban design is to memorialize the anti-apartheid struggle. Urban solutions did so by designing the precinct in a way that ensures all visitors to the site must pass by the preserved Awaiting Trial Block stairways. The Awaiting Trial Block was completely destroyed, aside from its stairways, which were saved and left as a memorial to the prisoners who were detained there. In an effort to memorialize the remains of the Awaiting Trial Block, the architects decided to project translucent glass and steel rectangular structures from the top of each stairway like modern-day obelisks. Steel beams encase the four corners of each stairway to ensure the conservation. During the day, sunlight touches the monument and is caught illuminating the translucent towers. At night, lights are projected out of the tops, signaling the fact that Constitution Hill is a beacon of hope. Viagra and his team intentionally guide the visitor to the memorial staircases, regardless of which gate they enter. The audience is reminded of the struggle of apartheid each time they traverse through the space. It is through the memorials becoming a part of the community's daily routine that the precinct is transformed into the site of apartheid memory. As a site of memory, Constitution Hill is an example of the importance of the role of space in designing post-apartheid and even post-colonial monuments. It is the manipulation of space that provides the ability for visitors to Constitution Hill to work through or, as I argue, walk through the past. Because of the architect's urban spatial design, walking through the trauma caused by apartheid is made possible. As pedestrians traverse the space, they are reminded of the pain inflicted by apartheid, thus combatant and collective forgetting, and utilize the space that refuses the spatialization of race, thus reimagining what opposed to apartheid urban space could be. Taking a cue from Madonna's argument that it is essential to work through the past in order to prevent a return to fascism, walking through the past is a crucial part of dismantling the legacy of apartheid. Walking through the past provides an opportunity to reflect on the trauma of the past and address the structures that allow the trauma to occur. It is not enough to will the painful memory of the past away. The spatial structure of apartheid requires a spatial response in order to grapple with it. Using Madonna's theory of working through the past as a theoretical framework, Constitution Hill provides an example of how apartheid can be challenged by providing an opportunity to walk through the past. During my time in South Africa, I routinely mulled over Madagula's statement. Other friends and interlocutors agreed with his sentiment. Despite a deeply committed effort to construct an equitable and inclusive society, the dream for true democracy remains out of reach. Although famous for its groundbreaking efforts, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ultimately did not address the structural legacies of the apartheid regime. The economic, social, and as we have seen spatial infrastructure of the apartheid era still remain in place. As it is true with all efforts towards decolonization, it is not simply enough to acknowledge the history of colonialism. An active move towards dismantling colonial structures must be made. It is not enough to merely acknowledge the existence of apartheid. The systems of oppression that still exist must be confronted and toppled. The apartheid spatial system is merely a microcosm of the continued legacy of apartheid that exists across South Africa. Even though the African National Congress has been in power for over two decades, the mechanisms of oppression and exploitation implemented during apartheid are still in place today. Constitution Hill Human Rights Precinct is more than a monument to the trauma experienced under apartheid. It is a blueprint for decolonization. The site confronts the structural and spatial inequities created under apartheid and demonstrates an alternative. It is not simply memorialized the past, but actively attempts to dismantle the apartheid urban spatial system by creating a democratic public urban space. Thank you. It is my great pleasure to introduce Louis Loftus as our next speaker. Louis is a fourth year PhD candidate in the Department of Art and Archeology at Princeton University. After having obtained his BA in philosophy and French from New York University. His main research area covers the intersections of architecture and natural science in 19th century France. Notably, in the development and status of iBudity as a potent biological analogy and complex and contested theoretical category within architecture between 1820s and 1860s. He particularly looks at the way the concept appeared in the course of architectural history and theory taught at the École des Beaux-Arts. In its role in the birth of architectural preservation as a discipline and its articulation with the moving concept of eclecticism in built projects both in Paris and North Africa. I must also add that Louis is a fantastic architectural critic and a brilliant draftsman. Today he will present the result of a site project that he has been developing in the last month. His communication is entitled The Architectural Exhibition of 1852. Architectural Display and Discourse in Mid-19th century Britain. Please join me in welcoming Louis to the podium. I'd also just like to thank the Barnes and Temple University for organizing this event as well as Martha Lucy for moderating. Leah Plumlow for all she did to bring this together as well as my advisor for his lovely introduction. And I'd like to express my solidarity as well with the graduate workers at Temple who are currently striking for fair wages and benefits. And I invite the audience to learn more about the Temple University Graduate Student Association. The Architectural Exhibition of 1852, hereafter referred to as the 52 exhibition, took place between January and March of that year in a recently opened gallery on Regent Street in London. It was the third in a series of public exhibitions bearing that name dedicated exclusively to architecture, but the first to be held on a large scale and by its own independent committee. This made it one of the first events of its kind, certainly in Britain and perhaps all of Europe. The no copies of the catalog have survived. It apparently included over 400 works from at least 100 different contributors. The 52 exhibition was much discussed at the time, but has received little comment from subsequent scholarship. As I hope to show, however, it was an event of great importance, not only in the history of architecture exhibitions which has tended to focus far more on the 20th century than the 19th, but for architectural history generally. Both a product of and arguably a contributor to architecture's growing independence from the fine arts in mid 19th century Britain. The 52 exhibition sheds new light on critical changes in and disputes over architecture's meaning and the role that the public and public display had in shaping it. Before discussing the exhibition directly, however, I will offer a brief sketch of the broader context in which it intervened. So as in France, architecture exhibitions emerged in Britain during the late 18th century as part of annual shows of painting and sculpture held by academies of art. But whereas architecture entered the Paris salon somewhat surreptitiously more in the guise of paintings, it occupied a distinct space within the principal art exhibitions in 18th century London. Namely those organized by the Society of Artists of Great Britain in the early 1760s and beginning a few years later in the Royal Academy or RA's summer exhibition. As Jocelyn Anderson has noted, these institutions were in part founded by architects, and their early exhibition catalogs referenced architecture directly. At the summer exhibition, though always far outnumbered by paintings, representations of buildings principally elevation drawings such as these seem to have been included from the outset and occupied an increasingly significant proportion. Indeed by 1811, the event had a dedicated architecture room, which it kept in some fashion throughout the 19th century. Still, architecture was undeniably a third class citizen at the summer exhibition. Moreover, according to Anderson, the types of buildings that predominated there during its early decades, namely villas and gentlemen's houses, suggest that the architects regarded the event less as an opportunity to advance the art of architecture or, quote, contribute to a wider dialogue. But more is an occasion, to quote Anderson, to attract clients and to showcase a range of architectural products that might be appealing to the consumer. It would seem then that the architecture room's audience was not a true public, at least in the sense given by Thomas Crowe and painters in public life, of a, quote, third party, a disinterested community with a degree of stability and staying power whose authority can be invoked either by the buyer or seller of a painterly or architectural service. The other major context in which architecture was exhibited in Britain before the 1850s were competitions. Public displays of entries to design competitions date back to at least the late 18th century. In Britain, the first major example of the form came in the wake of the burning of the Palace of Westminster in 1834. The initial proposal for a new palace met with strong public disapproval among both parliamentarians and the public. And so it was decided to find an alternative design via an open competition. Following an extensive press campaign, it was further decided that the finalist submissions would be exhibited for the express purpose of soliciting public opinion. According to Barry Bergdahl, this marked a threshold in, quote, the extension of the democratic claims of the public exhibition of architectural designs and its role in engendering public debate. Critically, however, competition exhibitions have, for the most part, clearly defined and relatively narrow instrumental functions, that is choosing the most appropriate designs for specific building projects. By mid-century then, exhibiting architecture was a fairly well-established practice in Britain, but one defined largely in terms of the academy and the competition. By contrast, the 52 exhibition emerged within the context of British architecture's initial consolidation as a profession and shift away from its previous statuses as a gentleman's pursuit or mere sub-discipline of the fine arts. A critical step in this shift was the establishment of independent professional organizations, such as the Architectural Association, or AA, in London. Led by Robert Kerr and Charles Gray, the AA's founders were primarily young men, frustrated with the quantity and quality of education available to beginning architects. In 19th century London, this training was primarily provided through apprenticeships and architectural offices, or increasingly, official educational institutions such as the Government School of Design, which was established in 1837. For men like Gray, however, neither venue was adequate. As he wrote in an 1846 issue of The Builder, what was needed was an independent institution, quote, to which the architectural student might resort, established exclusively for the study of architecture, and it was for this purpose that the AA was established in 1847. The AA's initial features consisted of regular design classes and theoretical lectures and extensive library and annual salons. Within a year, however, the AA committee had decided to add to its remit the hosting of an annual exhibition, what it called the architectural exhibition. At one level, this was a response to a quite practical concern or quite practical concerns. By 1848, there was widespread dissatisfaction with the amount and quality of the space given over to architecture at the summer exhibition, since it moved to the National Gallery a few years earlier. There was also a growing view that architecture would always suffer by comparison when exhibited alongside works of fine art in particular paintings. As an article in the Civil Engineer and Architects Journal put it, quote, architectural productions have no chance of obtaining any attention so long as paintings are there to be seen at the same place, especially at the academy, where the pictures are so numerous that they alone afford quite occupation enough for several visits. Yet I suggest that from its inception, the architectural exhibition was not simply a painting-free annex to the summer exhibition, but a distinct kind of event, just as the AA was a distinct kind of institution from the RA. Its collection was meant to go beyond watercolor elevations of country villas and incorporate plans, sections, and even models of a wide range of building types. Nor was it a competition, either for potential commissions or even honorary statuses. There was no jury and no prizes were given out. By all accounts, its audience were neither the members of a particular institution nor a pool of prospective clients, but the public or a public, one interested in architecture as an independent art form. This, it seems, was a novel endeavor and was written about as such in the professional presses. Over half a dozen articles were published in 1848 on the subject of architecture exhibitions, their proper format, purview, and criteria for success or failure. What was the purpose of such an event when held outside of any familiar institutional or instrumental framework, seemingly for its own sake? Despite the initial interest in the project, the inaugural exhibitions held in 1849 and 50 seem to have been relatively modest affairs and received little notice in the press. There was no architectural exhibition in 1851, by which point it had been spun off from the AA and put under the direction of a new exhibition committee. The 52 exhibition was the first organized by this independent committee and was a significantly larger and even bolder affair than the previous two. Critical to this was the acquisition of a new venue, namely the Portland Gallery located at 316 Regent Street directly across from the Royal Polytechnic Institute. It was a fitting choice having been built the previous year for the institution for the free exhibition of modern art, another newly founded independent organization attempting to challenge the hegemony of the Royal Academy, though in the realm of painting. The Portland Gallery also provided far more space than the events previous venues with three different rooms in which to exhibit. The committee took this as an opportunity both to increase the size and reorganize the collection as well as to broaden its scope. It divided two of the rooms roughly between what might be termed professional work. Those are representations of past current and speculative projects by practicing or apprenticing architects and student work, mostly drawings produced for design courses at the AA. With the remaining space, the committee chose to attempt something quite new. As they announced in a November 1851 article in The Builder, one of the gallery's rooms would be given over to, quote, new materials, new patents and designs connected with architectural construction, models, carvings, decorations, and other architectural objects. The addition of this materials room was a radical innovation and one that showed the influence of the Great Exhibition of 1851. Though it did not have a section devoted specifically to architecture, the Great Exhibition did showcase the constituent parts of buildings, new materials, manufacturing methods, and structural elements contributing to what Alina Payne has called the objectification of architecture. The materials room continued this emphasis on the objective, and many of the objects it displayed had actually been taken from the collection at the Crystal Palace. However, the addition of this space should not be viewed as a commitment by the exhibition committee to a purely technical view of architecture, as simply an applied science or craft. Rather, its inclusion in contents speaks to the expansiveness of the 52 exhibitions' conception of the architectural, a domain that could now encompass objects as mundane as samples of parquet flooring without excluding clear works of art. In fact, the only surviving object from the materials rooms, as far as I am aware, is this model for the proposed restoration of the monument to Queen Philip of Hano and Westminster Abbey, essentially a piece of alabaster and marble sculpture designed by George Gilbert Scott and carved by John Bernie Philip. The committee's inclusive curatorial approach also extended to the collection of professional work, which varied widely, both in terms of subject matter and mode of representation. Churches seem to have been the most common building type, but they were far from the majority. Also on view were numerous designs for monumental and civic projects, such as schools, hospitals, and several proposals for improvements to the National Gallery, including a well-known plan by James Ferguson, one of the exhibition committee's honorary secretaries. While there were some typical examples of fine houses and country villas, the most noted domestic project was a sketch for a cottage by James Edmiston, another honorary secretary, which apparently employed a novel system of iron framing and clay infill slabs and was meant to serve as a model for mass-produced laborer's dwellings. Along similar lines, more utilitarian programs were also well represented, what one commentator referred to as street and shop architecture and common structures, such as bridges. In some cases, this shaded into infrastructure and urban improvement, there was, for example, a picturesque watercolor by architect and panoramist Thomas Allam, depicting his design for improvements to the banks of the Seine. There were also numerous scale models, including an enormous one by Charles Pearson's then-much-one-of, Charles Pearson's then-much-discussed, designed for a central London railway terminus, which occupied the entirety of a large table. A final category worth mentioning are monuments, which included several interesting examples of competition entries re-displayed outside the context of a competition exhibition. Among these was a submission to an 1850 competition for a monument to the late Prime Minister, Robert Peale, from the pioneering French architect, Héctor O'Ho. His design called for a massive, freestanding iron structure straddling a bridge, whose silhouette remarkably prefigured that of the Eiffel Tower, built 37 years later. Certainly, much more could be said about each of these works but generally, my aim here is simply to illustrate the extent of the 52 exhibitions' stylistic and typological diversity, as well as the range of media on view. As the Athenaeum characterized it in its review, both the walls and the catalogue exhibit a most confused melody of heterogeneous subjects. Executed in un-executed designs, original compositions, portrait delineations of buildings or their details, modern and ancient Gothic and Italian, Indian and Renaissance, finished drawings, outline ones and sketches being all mixed up together. The 52 exhibition was widely advertised in both professional and popular publications. It was open seven days a week from 10 a.m. till dusk, giving most working-class Londoners a chance to visit. While the previous architectural exhibitions had been free, the added cost of renting the Portland Gallery led the committee to charge an admission fee in 1852, one shelling for a single entry plus the catalogue and two shellings for a season pass. This was a reasonable, but not a negligible sum. For reference, one shelling would have amounted to about half of Bob Cratchett's Daily Take-Home Pay at the offices of Scrooge and Marley and the Christmas Carol set just a few years earlier. Still, it seems there was an effort to keep the event as accessible as possible, for instance by giving free tickets to workmen upon application at the gallery. Thus, the 52 exhibition offered a remarkably broad view of Britain's architectural landscape at mid-century and to a remarkably broad audience. To conclude, I will look briefly at the 52 exhibition's reception in the contemporary press. One notable aspect of this coverage was simply its volume, with notices in at least two dozen publications ranging from mainstream broadsheets like The Daily News and leading professional publications journals like The Builder to local papers like The Portsmouth Times and Naval Gazette. While this poses a challenge to any systematic presentation, the comments can be roughly divided between discussions of the actual works on display, their quality and relevance to broader trends, and those of architecture exhibitions as a form. With respect to the former, views and points of emphasis varied widely, tending to reflect the perspectives of the journal in question. For instance, the ecclesiologists primarily focused on the church designs, presenting them as evidence of the, quote, growing taste for Gothic styles, while the civil engineer and architects journal gave far more attention to the more utilitarian projects in the materials room. Overall, reactions were largely positive, and nearly every review singled out a number of works for particular praise. Once again, these varied depending on the publication, though a few items were especially popular, such as George Truffitt's design for the street front of a town church. The only major criticism of the collection expressed by multiple reviews was that for all the commendable and promising work, it suffered from a lack of truly exemplary contributions by leading figures. According to the Athenaeum, for instance, it was regrettable that few of the, quote, architect members of the Royal Academy decided to participate. The ecclesiologists specifically bemoaned the, quote, absence of such names as Puge and Carpenter, Butterfield and Street, and argued that because the exhibition had no, quote, recognized aristocracy or merit or position, the present collection contains a greater proportion of mediocre drawings than would have been under a happier constitution of affairs. For most reviewers, however, the lack of such an aristocracy was a crucial source of the exhibition's appeal. Naturally, there was much discussion of the materials room, the focus less on individual pieces than their overall effect. According to the builder, the materials collection brought, quote, such objects more fully and immediately before the notice of architect and public than could be done in any other way. The civil engineer and architects journal argued that the materials room marked a critical departure from the, quote, narrow basis of the Royal Academy, and the start of a, quote, closer union between manufacturers and architects, each able to see more clearly the interdependence of their professions. Scott's model for Queen Philip's tomb did receive some special praise, as for instance in the illustrated London news which printed an illustration of it, noting that the actual tomb on which it was based is, quote, now in a state of deplorable dilapidation, and one of the objects of the present work is to excite a feeling for its restoration. Perhaps more interesting than the commentary on the collection was that on the event itself. As the initial proposal had been in 1848, the 52 exhibition was a catalyst for discussion of the purposes and potential of public architectural display. One major theme was the advancement of the discipline and the ability of its practitioners. The spectator concluded its review, for instance, by stating that, quote, we feel convinced that nothing tends more effectively to promote the art of architecture than the bringing together of its professors' work for mutual and public criticism. Another theme was the edifying effect on non-architects in terms of their knowledge, interest, and taste. As the Athenaeum wrote, to begin to, quote, remove existing prejudices and misconceptions regarding architecture and to foster an intelligent appreciation and to put architecture boldly forward as a candidate for public notice was the effect of this independent exhibition. Another view saw the exhibition less as a means of improving the state of contemporary architecture than of understanding it. An article in the literary Gazette described the event as, quote, a school of comparison and ambulation and an index of public taste. According to the author, quote, an architectural exhibition should be able to tell us what our architects can really do and what the public is actually and want of. This last comment is particularly significant as it speaks to a prevailing sense of uncertainty and possibility within mid-19th century British architectural culture and awareness that a new understanding of the discipline was needed but that developing it would have to be a collective enterprise. Joseph Paxton, designed for the Great Exhibition's Crystal Palace, had sparked a fierce national debate over whether it was truly an architectural work or simply a clever piece of structural engineering, a newly emerging field. If architecture was something more than a science of construction but something other than a fine art, what was it? This was not a question to which the 52 exhibition gave a single definitive answer but an enduring dialectic to which it gave an early public stage. Thank you. Thank you to the three of you for really, really fascinating papers, very, very rich, full of new research, archival research, and just, I don't know, I learned a lot, so thank you, I really enjoyed them. I think I'm going to start, I'm going to ask a couple questions and then open it up. With a couple of questions for Louie. It's not Louie? Go ahead, Louie. Okay. I was planning to call you Louie, but... Okay, Louie. Let's see. I guess I have lots of questions about the actual role of the public in kind of the changing status of architecture during this time and, you know, the idea that this architecture exhibition could be an index of public taste, I mean, how much influence did the public actually have over what was being designed? Yeah, I mean, as far as in Britain, generally during this period, or as far as what was winding up in those galleries? I don't know. I mean, I guess just, I, that line really kind of jumped out at me. I was, because, I mean, was architecture at that time, could it really be an index of public taste if it was being mostly commissioned by, you know, the government or the churches? Well, I suppose, you know, it's hard to say. Oh, my gosh. Is it honor? Okay. No, it's hard to say in a definitive way. I mean, what I take that comment to be signifying sort of two things with respect to public taste. I mean, the first is that one of the things that is meant to be remarkable about this exhibition is that while it includes a lot of the things that you would have seen at the Royal Academy, it also includes a lot of things that you wouldn't have seen. That is to say things that aren't necessarily public commissions, upper class commissions, you know, villas, but the sorts of houses that are lining the streets. Now, at this point, how much the future occupants of these houses, how much the public is influencing the designs at this point is hard to say. I think what's fair to say is that it's more than it would have been a few decades earlier. And what I take this writer as saying is that a goal here should be for that influence to be greater than it's been. Is that what the exhibition can do? It's a problem at this point. You know, let's say you even agreed that you want the public to have a say in this and you want their influence to be felt, which is still a fairly radical thing to say at this point. How is it that you determine what it is they want? Well, one way of doing that is you have an exhibition where you can compare things in a way. You can look at things side by side in a sort of neutral context that you couldn't do just out on the street and actually gauge interest, see what things do well in this kind of exhibition. Insofar as that writer wants this to be an index of public taste, I see that as something of an aspirational goal that is to say the public isn't having enough influence on the way our buildings are designed and they ought to. That said, I do think, I mean, I quote frequently from these like professional journals, which are themselves a kind of new innovation with respect to tapping and expressing public sentiments about architecture from most of them are founded within the decades immediately preceding this. I see the architectural exhibition as being kind of part of that same project. Yeah, I mean, it was very convincing. I also was surprised by the inclusion of that materials room, especially because if the goal of the exhibition was to sort of present architecture as an independent art form and you said something about it being kind of like this high-minded thing that was kind of non-commercial and it's not about a jury and it's not about a competition, presenting the materials feels like commercial in a way. Yeah, no, I think that's a, yeah, I sort of wish I had actually underscored that tension more because I think that is kind of central to what I think is interesting about the event. Is that on the one hand, it is high-minded. It's about the art of architecture. It is not a trade show where the idea is that we're essentially selling, we're selling to prospective buyers or even a public commission where we're just trying to figure out what is going to be an acceptable, an acceptable design for this one particular building. But yes, a forum in which to think about architecture kind of abstractly and as an art form and at the same time it has this really remarkable emphasis on the technique, on the actual craft, the actual doing of architecture. And I think what's interesting about that is I actually think that that kind of resonates with what would become the sort of emerging status of architecture as this art form that involves this technique, craft element that can't be excised from it. That is to say if you're going to have a kind of high-minded discussion about architecture as an art, it has to also include utilitas. It can't just be venestas. It has to be about the, or fermitas. It has to be about the technique side of that. And it's that, it's like insofar as it has to include that kind of craft element, that structural, that engineering and applied science element, that it is a distinct kind of thing, perhaps still an art form but a distinct kind of art form from painting and sculpture. Insofar as there's kind of an argument being made by the exhibition, that's what I take it to be. And it seems to be as remarkable at the time as it seems to us now that they would include a room like that in an event called the Architectural Exhibition. It's not called the Architectural and Applied Crafts Exhibition. It's all sort of put under that one umbrella. Great. Now, Stephanie and Bianca, I'm going to ask you a couple questions sort of together because I thought that there were some really interesting connections between your topics. You know, both are about memorializing in a way. Both are about creating monuments. I thought that your phrase, it's a blueprint for decolonization was really great. And then it made me realize that, you know, an interesting contrast to what you were talking about, Bianca, which was really a blueprint of colonization. And so what I wanted to ask about and maybe just sort of comment about and sort of notice and then ask you to respond or to respond to each other's talks, if you would, about the walking through of space because that was very important to both projects. You know, I mean, the subverting of apartheid urban spatial design and the meanings that are created by that sort of physical act of walking. But then also in the palace, you know, the garden room being the center of empire becomes much more meaningful simply because of the fact that you are walking through those scenes first of subjugation. So just sort of with that idea, I wonder if you could, if either of you want to say more about that. Yeah, I think that the immersive aspect of walking through space is really, and I don't want to speak for you, but I can see that it's really important in communicating message and communicating meaning, I should say. And I think the act of inserting yourself into a space and especially at Constitution Hill, daily walking through it is kind of a, I don't want to say like a shift. I guess I would say, yeah, I will say it, but the mindset as you're doing this daily and it becomes habitual, which I think is really important and central to the architect's mission here is this fact that you, every day you're being reminded of what happened here and the struggle and also the fact that it opens out into the public is really important. And to have to sort of physically experience that. Yes, exactly, yes. In fact, it's powerful. Yeah, and that's a really important thing to keep in mind about Neo-Issyrian release is that they are kind of all encompassing in a way. They are from floor to ceiling. They are experienced as people are moving through the space and you don't really see a lot of blankness. You don't see a lot of like empty walls. You're constantly seeing some sort of scene, some sort of message. And when you traverse from the throne room courtyard up into the palace terrace, there's actually a single corridor in which there's a double registered procession scene where non-Issyrian peoples are bringing horses. They're carrying spears. They're carrying bowls, bags. They're carrying tribute to this area of the palace that I'm talking about that then depicts the same people being subjugated. And so in a way there is kind of this reinforcement of their position, of their role in the empire, but also the repetition of these procession scenes specifically, which you can see on the last slide, is kind of almost apotropically reinforcing this. So you can see this anxiety of the threat of these people acting in the opposite fashion. But this concept of walking through the space and experiencing it is definitely integral to these scenes as a means of attempting to reinforce this kind of behavior. Yeah. And I'm going to ask you, I'm going to put you on the spot, Bianca. I mean, I really loved your argument. And this, what did you call them, the periphery monuments? Yeah. And the inscribing of the sort of empire onto the landscape and then the sort of reverse of that, bringing it back. I had trouble with your conclusion. I had trouble with your conclusion just sort of understanding it actually because you say that there's this inherent contradiction. I just want to ask you to talk about it a little bit because I really want to understand it. I don't understand how the, I don't know, sort of how the gardens, the meaning of the gardens can only sort of undercuts its own. Please help me. So I should say that one of the central facets of Neo-Assyrian kingship is bringing order to chaos. And the chaos is the other. They're the non-Assyrian, both in the figural and non-figural sense. By bringing them into the empire and in a sense, Assyrianizing them, you are then creating order. You're creating this, how do I say it? You're creating, you're creating peace essentially. And by bringing these non-Assyrian elements into what I argue to be a very ritually significant space, they are on one side kind of like neutralizing the threat of the chaos, but at the same time revealing how integral they are in defining this specific space. And so my entire dissertation really pushes at the notion that the Neo-Assyrian kind of ideology pushes that they are the end-all, be-all, they are the most powerful empire. But this reliance on depicting and visually subjugating the other is integral to defining itself. And so what does that say both about the Neo-Assyrian empire that they are intrinsically tied to the other in order to define itself? And so looking at the garden scenes, we see a lot of this repetition of this conquering and subjugating of peoples without these peoples being present. But if you remove these images from these scenes, which is a digital humanities project that I want to work on after my dissertation is finished, I actually want to recreate this area of the palace and remove non-Assyrian peoples and plants, animals, and architecture. And then to see exactly how much of the palace would actually remain, which is very little. So we have this very intense reliance on visually subjugating these people, but it's truly revealing how reliant they are on that subjugation itself in order to define their superiority in the ancient world. Thank you. Fascinating. I want to open it up to questions. Bruce, I have all kinds of questions, but I will restrain myself. I actually wanted to follow up with Bianca because we just saw the images up there. And when you were speaking, I was thinking about the slide that has all of those aquatic animals and then the most recent slide that had the vessel. And in the vessel there seems to be a figure holding another animal that looks like a dog or something that has a long tail. And I was interested in that. If you go back to the vessel, it's... This is the other place. I think it's like the third to last slide? Yeah. With the slide we were just looking at before, which has the bird on it. It's a vessel. Oh, the stag vessel. The silver stag vessel. Yeah. Yeah. On the stag vessel next to the image we saw of the bird. Can we bring that image back? There we go. Then there's a figure on a stag holding another animal on his arm, which might be a... I don't know what that animal is. I was trying to understand what that... Another bird. Another bird. And then he's holding a staff of some kind. Is that right? Okay, that's what I was trying to understand because I thought it might be another exotic animal. Right. And I was thinking about all of this to say, I was thinking about the way that they were gathering together just like the renaissance 16th century, Kevin's of Curiosity, they were gathering together all of the signs of domination into one place in that wonderful image of the aquatic figures. And even on this vessel, which struck me as maybe having a wide variety of animals on it. And then in the image where the bird is actually being shot down in the garden. Right? So there's this... I really wanted to know more about their husbandry, the relationship they had with animals. Were they only in the wild? How did they cultivate them? Do we know anything about more intensely their animal relations in that moment? Because I find them really fascinating in these images. So when we think about animals and kind of the repetition of them, they also are a symbol of abundance. They're kind of... So this figure specifically, or this object specifically is a neo-Hittite vessel. So it's a little bit different, but actually neo-Assyrian iconography actually pulls a lot from neo-Hittite art and imagery. And this kind of duplication and repetition of natural features including plants and animals and water actually too is an indication of abundance. So the repetition of these animals is a way of signaling the neo-Assyrian king's positive relationship with the gods because it's through that relationship that the king is able to provide abundance. Either through trade, through warfare, things like that. He needs the approval of the gods in order to be successful. And so when we see a lot of these plants and animals and the concept of like a lush garden, that again is speaking to that relationship with the gods. But in general, like with the arouk face as well, the duplication of kind of like the double, like the male-female animals or kind of like baskets of food, things like that reproduced in a cyclical fashion, which I argue Room 7 also is created intentionally that way, is to again reinforce this concept of repetition and circularity as a means of reinforcing this positive relationship as well. So we have a lot of kind of different devices, like artistic devices happening in this room to again kind of symbolize the permanence, the kind of in perpetuity of this positive relationship as well. I will also just remind people listening online, tuning in online that you can type if you have questions or comments into the chat. Hi. Thank you. And thank you for the three wonderful papers. Lewis, I've got a question for you to begin. And then I'd love to also pose a question to Bianca if that's all right. Lewis, what the role of the founding of the AA of Robert Kerr and the high visibility of James Ferguson and the early exhibitions, if I understand what you're saying, raises in my mind the question of whether there is some explicit following in those two polemicists' desire to unseat the historicist pattern in English architecture. Is this intended to be, you know, unlike the RA show and certainly some, you know, the horror and some of the other projects, some of the other projects seem to evince that, but was that explicit? Was this supposed to be the new architecture and a place to polemicize it to the public, a post-historicist architecture? As far as the explicit intentions of the AA initially, because when the architectural exhibitions first put together, as I said, it's an AA element, but not by 52, of course the independent architectural exhibition committee is, I think maybe every member of it is an AA member, so I mean, they're clearly aligned, but their explicit intentions are, as I recall, almost entirely limited to the need for an exhibition as opposed to these sort of secondary effects of how this exhibition may affect architecture. There's a lot of that kind of speculation from secondary commentary in 52, but few kind of, you know, less of an agenda that I've seen explicitly expressed. That said, they may well have had one. What I think is interesting is how sort of contradictory the 52 exhibition would have been to that project if that was their project. I don't think you would have gone through that collection and said, well, this is clearly a polemic against historicism. You could have found evidence for that as you might have in defensive historicism. If there's one thing that I think it may have been a polemic against, it's academicism. It's the control of the architectural community by this academy and particularly by this art academy. The ecclesiologist loves the evidence of the Gothic revival that's on view. The civil engineer journals love the evidence of utilitarian structures that are on view. What you probably won't resonate with or rather what you wouldn't have found supported is the old academic view. There are a few academicians exhibiting and the entire enterprise is meant to be separate from and against the Royal Academy. But again, that doesn't necessarily commit you to almost anything else. You know, vis-a-vis style, vis-a-vis construction method, vis-a-vis architectural conception, except insofar as it was something other than a fine art controlled by a central art academy. Thank you. That's very helpful. I don't know why. Hello. Sorry. To the boundary markers, what about gardening practices? Is the landscape literally its unreality? I mean, I think we all, you know, at some point taught ourselves to accept the power of the artificial, of the abstract in this art. But what is the interface between the depictions of the garden and perhaps actual gardening practices outside that wind door that we lead into the real world? Yeah, that's a great question. I think when we can kind of return to the Sargon's bull colossi inscription where he specifically indicates that he is looking to the Sierra Anatolian region for inspiration for the plants and animals that make up his garden specifically. So I think in these types of depictions, we have an immortalized, idealized, paradisical version of what they want the gardens to look at or look like, excuse me. They're always going to be in bloom. They're always going to be lush and verdant. And I think when we can think about, so we don't have any specific descriptions of neo-Syrian gardens other than the general ones we have that are kind of associated with shade, fragrance, et cetera, that Wiseman talks about. But when we think about the way that they are organized or even the animals and things like that that can be cited from their game reserves, we can look a lot to these lists of tribute objects and procession scenes as well to see the kind of objects that have been immortalized as the pinnacle of the types of tribute that can be added to these things. So excuse me, the ivory that I talk about with the plant in it, for example, like the Northwest Palace Throne Room Facade, which is not in this presentation, but has monkeys as a part of the tribute procession. And that's about 883 to 859 to the beginning of the neo-Syrian empire. Shalmanes are the third right after Oshar Nasser-Paul, who built the Northwest Palace. The Black Obelisk also has camels and monkeys also. They're really interested in monkeys. But those kinds of animals, which become, again, a symbol of not only the breadth of the control of these kings to have over these foreign regions, but the ability to maintain and keep them alive. So unfortunately, we don't have kind of like an organizational kind of schematic of what these gardens would look like, but we do know what would be the most ideal plants and animals in these places. And we don't have garden archaeology. No, I wish, yeah. Yeah. But these scenes do survive. Oshar Bonapal, the last major Assyrian king, also has a garden scene in which he's reclining on a chair or on a bench with his queen facing him, and they're underneath this kind of canopy of great vines. And so this is a multi-registered garden scene. I believe one of the lower levels is like a marsh land where lions are kind of walking through grass. So we see, again, this garden imagery with, for example, in the Oshar Bonapal scene, there's the head of a decapitated defeated king, an Elamite king, Teoman. There's an Egyptian necklace citing Oshar Bonapal's campaigns in that region. So we do have more of these citational representations of military victories in garden scenes. So we do have this kind of, like, again, a pretty firm association with these activities and gardens as kind of a rhetorical model for success. Yeah. Thank you. I'm going to jump in with another question. Sorry. I wanted to ask Stephanie about more, to talk more about this idea of overcoming the past by really dealing with it and staring the ugliness in the face, as you said. And it reminded me of something that I read a couple days ago in the newspaper about a law school in Vermont. Maybe you've read about this that has a, there's a slavery mural. I don't know when it was created, like during the 60s maybe, that depicts the brutalities of slavery in this country. And they are now calling for it to be covered up. And I wondered if you could comment on that. Do you want me to comment on the act of, excuse me, the act of trying to cover up the, I don't know, you don't have to comment on it. No, I wouldn't do that too. I mean, what's your opinion? Do you think it should be covered up? I have not seen the mural itself. I was wondering if you could just, is it just depicting the history of enslavement in, or is it, like is it? I didn't look that close to that. Oh, okay. Yeah. If it is just depicting the history of enslavement, I think, I mean, we're in, oh, I'm going to get too political, but I think we are in an era in which certain factions of the population would like to get rid of our learning of the horrible foundations of this nation. And I think we risk, by trying to forget, collectively forget about the, our history that we would like, that we wish should not happen, I think we risk learning from the lessons that we learned moving out of that moment. And I think it's, and monuments that remind us of our history that we would like, that we would rather did not exist, I think is dangerous. And we are bound to repeat it if we don't deal with it and then learn from it and try and find a better way forward. Yeah, it's a scary time right now, honestly, especially as someone who teaches this history, and I'm currently missing my words right now, but it's scary to be someone who is trying to teach students about this history and you are fighting against people who would like you not to. And murals and monuments that help are an important facet as an art historian who teaches this history of touchstones of our ugly past, but also I always teach my students to look at it and what can we learn from it. So I am against covering up monuments and I don't know if that's clear, but I am against covering up monuments and murals. It's clear. Thank you, I know that's a hard topic, but I just wanted to make sure that we acknowledged it. Thank you. Thank you for starting off the day with these great talks. I had a question for you as well, Stephanie, and it's more of a formal design question. I was curious about the material choice of glass for the stairwell monuments, especially seeing that they have to be reinforced with this heavy steel structure. I was just curious if you could talk a little bit about what that glass does or if you had read about that material decision. Yeah. Symbolically, the glass is meant to... I mean, it's meant to catch this light and then reflect it back, both during the day and then at night. Albee Sachs, one of the constitutional court justices during the transition to apartheid, actually calls Constitution Hill a beacon on a hill as a way to reflect what South Africa could be, specifically in this transition from apartheid to democracy. And these glass structures that then emit light through both electric light and then through the sunlight are meant to represent that. So he was very influential and worked very closely with the architects in designing this space, and he was very influential in designing these monuments and working with how the memorials could represent this beacon on a hill, and that's why that choice was made. Thank you. Thank you, all three. I also had a question about these. Because Constitution Hill was a prison complex, I'm struck by the towers kind of gesturing towards surveillance in a way, and then maybe inverting it because of the glass. So I was just wondering if you could maybe share more about that, if you've thought about that, or... Yeah. There's a lot... Well, these are remaining from a prison complex. There are actually stairways that would lead up to the second floor of the prison. They do... As you're saying, that reminds me of a second chapter in my dissertation of Eastern State Penitentiary and the tower that would be used to surveil the prisoners. I really like what you said about the subverting of it. I had actually not thought about that, but I think it's really powerful, and I'm going to think about that more. So thank you. Now it's going to become a longer chapter. Sorry, David. And I think we do need to break for lunch, but did you... I think we have time for one more if you wanted to ask the question. It was closely aligned to that question. It is a good follow-up to what... But what blocked off is nowhere to go. That does remind us of the surveillance, and it's another way to subvert it. It's not only being transparent now, it's kind of spaces of... This kind of vertical blocking connections horizontally. Thank you. Well, thank you for these great papers and this great conversation. We are going to meet back here at 1.10 for our second session, and I misspoke earlier. That session is being chaired by Jennifer Gonzalez, not by Cindy Kang, our curator. So please join us, rejoin us at 1.10. Thank you.