Yale Architecture Forum: Infrastructral Realism

Please join the Yale Department of History of Art and the Yale School of Architecture for the first Architecture Forum of 2024.

We will welcome a talk from Professor Mark Crinson titled “Infrastructral Realism” on Monday, February 19th at 6:30pm in Smith Conference Room (Rudolph 322.) drinks and refreshments to follow!

Professor Mark Crinson will speak about the early years of a new understanding of infrastructure, and will use various forms of representation (brochures, a feature film, architectural drawings) to explore the phenomenon in the case of the international airport just after the Second World War when infrastructural projects came into existence not only as “signs of themselves, but as trope, rhetoric, image, poetics.” London (Heathrow) airport became the main location for the film Out of the Clouds (1955), interpreted here as a training manual in how to learn the airport, namely how to negotiate infrastructure either/both because you don’t really know it is there or/and because you understand it as demonstratively sensitive to human craft and experience. The film’s treatment of infrastructure has continuing associations to contemporary conversations about forced labor, central state planning, territoriality, immigration, and citizenship.

Professor Mark Crinson is is Emeritus Professor of Architectural History at Birkbeck (University of London), and previously taught at the University of Manchester (1993-2016). He was Vice-President then President of the European Architectural History Network, 2016-20. Recent books include Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester (2022, winner of the 2024 Historians of British Art Prize), The Architecture of Art History – A Historiography (2019, co-authored with Richard J. Williams), Alison and Peter Smithson (2018), and Rebuilding Babel: Modern Architecture and Internationalism (2017). He is currently working at the YCBA on part of his book-length project on Heathrow airport and the area around it, titled ‘Heathrow’s Genius Loci: Architecture, Landscape and Infrastructure in Peri-Urban London’. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.