Date:
Deadline February 15, 2025.
This colloquium investigates the emergence of "technocelebrity" architects in the 20th century, emphasizing the crucial role of intermediaries—such as publicists and intellectuals—in shaping their public image and influence through media and cultural discourse.
Long before the term ‘starchitects’ was coined, the 20th century witnessed the rise of architects to new levels of international prominence. In striking contrast to earlier examples of famous architects, the likes of Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius were no longer only known for specific architectural achievements, but rather known as signifiers of the promise of the modern world: rationally organized cities, private spaces allowing for new emancipated life-styles and generally all the expectations coming with technological progress and the rise of planning. The successful architect embraced new models of architectural mediageneity. Their skills as a publicist, organizer and media theoretician enabled them to assume what we brand ‘Technocelebrity,’ the celebritized embodiment of technology and technocracy. The immense, enduring allure of some of the protagonists of the Modern Movement is arguably based on the combination of architectural appeal with intentional mediatization. This phenomenon cannot be reduced to a mere intrinsic architectural genius. Instead, these architects should rather be seen as the result of collaborative––albeit not necessarily planned––efforts that successfully tapped into societal expectations and broader cultural discourses.
This colloquium focuses on the work of intermediaries––publicists, intellectuals and journalists––who were instrumental in forming reputations, for better or worse. We intend to focus on ‘intermediaries’ as crucial actors in the emergence of the technocelebrity phenomenon, investigating their relationship to media, expertise, social vision and societal negotiations on progress and change in the 20th century. We assume that the intermediaries reflect or embody important characteristics of their time such as gender roles, the social role of technology, political ideologies, and the Cold War. But they also attest to the individual and collective promise for improvement or even salvation, which the Modern Movement held as a mode of world-making. Understanding the intermediaries’ role, we argue, points far beyond questions of architectural style or personal careers and reflects the political, social, cultural dimensions of the Modern Movement as well as the deeper changes of the media and the public sphere formative for the 20th century. As a point of departure, the role of intermediaries can include but are not limited to:
We would like to look at intermediaries’ roles of translation between:
Examples––but not an exclusive list––of such intermediaries are housing activist and theoretician Catherine Bauer, architectural historian and CIAM secretary Siegfried Giedion, philosopher of technology Lewis Mumford, architectural critic Adolf Behne, Reyner Banham or Stanislaus von Moos, and publicist Ise Gropius. We explicitly also encourage a focus on less investigated intermediaries.
In a two-day colloquium, taking place in Leuven on September 25th & 26th 2025, and linked to the FWO-funded research project ‘The Rise of the ‘Technocelebrity’. The Politics of Social Expertise in the Public Careers of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius’, we would like to discuss and analyze different cases both in terms of single intermediaries but also diverse perspectives of the role these intermediates assumed and played. Keynote presentations will be given by Eva Hagberg and David Kuchenbuch. The Scientific Committee is composed of Janina Gosseye, Isabelle Doucet, Hilde Heynen, Veronique Boone, Betto van Waarden, and Barry Bergdoll.
We welcome proposals for 20-minute presentations and encourage proposals on more obscure personalities. An abstract of a maximum of 500-words and a brief CV should be sent to technocelebrity.conference@kuleuven.be. by February 15th, 2025. For practical questions please contact natalia.kvitkova@kuleuven.be. We intend to publish a selection of presented papers in a theme issue of an academic journal (title choice pending). Travel and accommodation costs could be, within certain limits, covered. There will be a 20 EUR participation fee.
