The Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2015 edition of the Toolkit for Today Summer Seminar will take place on July 6–10, 2015. Aggregate has been asked to host a series of seminars for PhD candidates from select Architectural History & Theory, Art History and Humanities PhD programs in North America and Europe during their summer residencies in Montreal. Aggregate organized two closed-door sessions as the starting point for dialogue and workshops with students. A free public lecture by Ijlal Muzaffar will take place on July 9, 2015.

Last Words: Community, Shelter and Other Architectural Alibis for Killing History

Lecture by Ijlal Muzzafar, with introduction by Edward Eigen

Thursday, July 9, 2015 at 6:00 p.m.
Paul Desmarais Theatre, Canadian Centre for Architecture

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“Core housing in Ghana,” proposed by Charles Abrams and Otto Koenigsberger. From the United Nations’ Manual on Self- Help Housing (1964).

Session #1: Disciplines and their Publics (Architectural History as a Resource)

Meredith TenHoor, Daniel M. Abramson, and Jonathan Massey

How is this interdisciplinarity linked to the project of public or activist scholarship? What contemporary questions does the methodological flexibility of architectural history allow us to tackle advantageously? How can architectural history act as a resource for those outside its realms of knowledge?

Session #2: Documents and their Appearances (The Resources of Architectural History)

Edward Eigen, Ijlal Muzaffar, and Michael Osman

Does the historian encounter the documents of architectural history as evidence of irreducible specificity and singularity? Or as exemplars within broader sets of universality and difference?