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10/27/2021 | Campus-Meldung

Visiting Professor Robert van Pelt: History of the wooden barrack

Prof. Dr. Robert van Pelt takes over a DAAD visiting professorship at the Department 06 Architecture - Urban Planning - Landscape Planning for the current winter semester.

Image: Kate Bueckert

He is a professor of cultural history at the Department of Architecture at Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada. The internationally best-known expert on the architectural history of the Auschwitz concentration camp dedicates his lecture series to the three-hundred-year history of the wooden barracks. The lectures take place every Thursday at 6 p.m., are open to the public and are broadcast online.  

The wooden barrack - almost completely ignored in the usual architectural historiography - is a universal building type of modernity. It emerged from globalization processes and at the same time it is a tool of globalization. The emergence of the barrack dates back to the 17th century. It has been inscribed with Austro-Hungarian military practices, U.S. timber construction, British colonialism, German standardization and industrialization, pandemics, the two World Wars, and the Holocaust, among others.

Program:

10/28-21: Ut Migraturus Habita: Introduction to the History of the Barracks.

04.11.21: With the Means at Hand: The military origins of the barracks.

11/18/21: A simple, inexpensive hut: the hygiene discourse on the barrack.

11/25/21: The invention of the prefabricated barrack.

12/2/21: Shabby, low, drafty, unkempt and unsightly: the barracks of the training camp.

12/9/21: A big show on the landscape: the promise of the barracks lazarets.

12/16/21: Learning from America: the barracks as a building block of hospital design.

01/13/22 (online only): Germany Germany Above All: The Barracks and the Ideal of the German Civilized Empire.

20.01.22 (online only): An excursion to Russia.

27.01.22 (online only): The most perfect portable demountable structure ever invented.

03.02.22 (online only): The barrack and the barbed wire fence.

10.02.22 (online only): The barracks as a means of unifying a nation.

More information and the live stream at: https://www.uni-kassel.de/fb06/institute/architektur/fachgebiete/architekturtheorie-und-entwerfen/veranstaltungen/van-pelt-geschichte-der-holzbaracke?no_cache=1#c1014147

Contact:
Prof. Dipl.-Ing. Philipp Oswalt
University of Kassel
Department 06: Architecture - Urban Planning - Landscape Planning
Department of Architectural Theory and Design
Tel. +49 561 804-3274
E-mail: oswalt[at]asl.uni-kassel[dot]de