2007 Press Releases
UCC hosts Public Lecture on Modern Architecture and Contemporary Art History
"Mapping Modernity: Louis Kahn's Parliament in Dhaka" is the title of a
public lecture to be delivered by Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty
(UCD) on Thursday, 22 March at UCC.
Hosted by UCC's History of Art, Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty,
who is an internationally renowned expert on Modern architecture, will
consider Louis Kahn's Parliament in Dhaka, Bangladesh in the context of
his design philosophy, particularly as it applied to the organization
of civic buildings. It will also address the ways in which Kahn's
career was shaped by the politics of the Cold War and the reasons that
postcolonial states and other countries in the developing world were in
many cases so eager to commission major modernist buildings. This
case study will be used to speculate about the relationship between
modernism and modernity in twentieth-century architecture and to argue
that Dhaka and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) although not yet
industrialized in Kahn's day, were indeed modern.
Professor Kathleen James-Chakraborty is Head of the School of Art
History and Cultural Policy, University College Dublin. She earned her
BA from Yale and MA and PhD from the University of Pennsylvania.
She taught for two years at the University of Minnesota before moving
to Berkeley. She has also held a Mercator visiting professorship
at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany. Her books include
Erich Mendelsohn and the Architecture of German Modernism (Cambridge,
1997) and German Architecture for a Mass Audience (Routledge,
2000). She is the editor of Bauhaus Culture from Weimar to the
Cold War (University of Minnesota, 2006).
This is the fourth lecture in the 2006/07 lecture series in theories of
Modernism and Postmodernism in the Visual Arts organised by History of
Art at UCC. The series brings national and international and
international scholars to UCC to reflect upon and present their
research in a series of events.
The lecture takes place on Thursday, 22 March at 6.15pm in West Wing 6,
Main Campus, UCC. Members of the public are invited to attend and
admission is free.
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