3rd Lucius Burckhardt Convention 2023
Saturday, June 17, 2023 from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Kunsthochschule Kassel, Menzelstr. 13-15, 34121 Kassel, Germany.
On Saturday, June 17, 2023, the Kunsthochschule Kassel will host the 3rd Lucius Burckhardt Convention, a one-day symposium on the life and work of Annemarie & Lucius Burckhardt, the inventors of the science of walking.
From 1973 to 1997, Burckhardt served as a professor in the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture at the University of Kassel. His work has critically accompanied the design of the environment, whether architecture, design, urban planning, or landscape planning, since the 1950s and continues to be relevant today beyond his death in 2003. For lack of a better term, we could also call such research art, he once let it be known.
The 3rd Lucius Burckhardt Convention is organized by Prof. Martin Schmitz and students in the product design department at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. Since the 2nd Convention in 2017, an astonishing amount has been researched and published on Annemarie & Lucius Burckhardt.
Saturday, June 17, 2023 / The convention will be held in German!
9:00 Markus Ritter / Martin Schmitz
Barely a good thing
Welcome and a look at five decades of planning criticism.
10:00 Jürg Grassl
From the Davos Promenade to Promenadology
Lucius Burckhardt spent his youth at the place where his father worked, a lung doctor in the Swiss tuberculosis spa Davos. His childhood home, Villa Burckhardt, built in 1926 by Rudolf Gaberel, shows how doctors and architects together dared to do something new and became pioneers of what we now call "modernity". Jürg Grassl takes us to Lucius Burckhardt's roots ...
10:45-11:15 Coffee
11:15 Henriette Lutz / Joana Teixeira Pinho
The artist Annemarie Burckhardt
The lecture gives an overview of the artistic work of Annemarie Burckhardt. The intention and the effect of her artistic works will be explored. The lecture shows artistic works, many of which have been forgotten or are largely unknown. Annemarie Burckhardt made embroidery her own as a supposedly typically "female" art, finding in it her own political and always humorous forms of expression. The lecture will explore the question of how Annemarie Burckhardt's artistic activity can be interpreted from a feminist perspective.
12:00 Phillipe Koch
Lucius Burckhardt's Sociology of Continuing Construction
Starting in the 1960s, Lucius Burckhardt dealt in depth with sociological problems of building and architecture. His reflections have never been published in a monograph, but appear in scattered glosses, articles, interviews, etc. In my contribution, I reconstruct Burckhardt's sociology of continuing to build based on his journalistic activities during his time as editor-in-chief of the architecture magazine Werk (1962-72). Burckhardt always understood the built environment and its transformation as a medium of the social, and in doing so he opposed a Marxist understanding that was common at the time, which assumed that architecture had a purely ideological representational function of the capitalist system. Burckhardt's relational approach, on the other hand, is more differentiated and discovers emancipatory potential in further building. The article concludes with reflections on whether and how Burckhardt's sociology of building on could be made fruitful for current challenges.
13-14 Lunch
14:00 Reto Bürgin
The world looks very different on site
than at the desk. - Does it?
The work of Lucius Burckhardt is multifaceted and consistent at the same time. From planning criticism to invisible design to walk science, Burckhardt sought to illuminate and critically question processes. With a systemic perspective, he succeeds in making the invisible visible and only negotiable. On the one hand, the lecture draws theoretical parallels between design criticism and actor-network theory. On the other hand, it gives insights into walk science in teaching practice, whereby the invisible becomes visible away from the desk.
14:45 Anne Gross
Urban planning and democracy [...] and the tasks of our generation.
The lecture looks at Anne's reading of walk science and how what was once a PhD project at the Tokyo Institute of Technology has developed into a practice of its own and visibly a way of life. In her work, Anne wants to move away from walk-related observations towards the question of how she can sharpen the perception of the everyday environment and uncover consolidated constructs within her professional possibilities. In doing so, she emphasises the importance of democracy in urban planning and focuses on the tasks of our generation.
15:30-16:00 Coffee
16:00 Günther Vogt / Thomas Kissling
walk, look, see - archives and walks in current teaching and landscape architecture practice - an attempt at a dialogical approach
In winter 2022, the personal library of Lucius and Annemarie Burckhardt has been transferred from the temporary storage of the University Library of Basel to the case studio VOGT in Zurich. Together with the private slide collection, which includes 34,000 images, the archive was made available to the public for research and teaching purposes. A first project, closely related to the library, will be published in spring 2023. The "Anthology Landscape" is a book project that Lucius had already largely developed in 1986 while working at the Gesamthochschule/Universität Kassel. The publication, which assembles a comprehensive collection of texts along nine landscape topoi, never appeared and will be published some 40 years later in an expanded and contextualized form. Library and book, however, are only two ways to approach the work of Lucius Burckhardt and to make it productively accessible for teaching, research and practice. The input will approach these approaches in a dialogical format.
From 18:00 Apéro / Buffet
Catering will be provided throughout the conference, and the day will end with a buffet in the foyer of the Kunsthochschule. Admission is free!
Sunday, June 18, 2023
11:00 Bertram Weisshaar
Audiowalk: The journey to Tahiti
Meeting and starting point: bus stop "Westfriedhof" bus line 24.
Arrival with bus line 11, e.g. from Wilhelmshöhe station 10:46 a.m. in the direction of DEZ-Einkaufszentrum, journey time 12 min.
In 1987, Lucius Burckhardt, together with the student project group Spaziergangswissenschaft, reconstructed the "Journey to Tahiti" through the Dönche nature reserve near Kassel: text excerpts from Georg Forster's "Journey Around the World" were read at selected locations - and Forster's descriptions of the paradisiacal island of Tahiti surprisingly also matched this landscape of a former military training area. On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary (2017) of the "Ur-Spaziergang" of Spaziergangswissenschaft, this audio walk reconstructs Burckhardt's "action teaching": the same texts spoken by the same actor can be heard again at the same locations. Additional listening stations add clues to actualize the question "Why is landscape beautiful?". The Audio Walk was realized by Bertram Weisshaar, and he will accompany this joint walk through the Dönche as part of the Burckhardt Convention.
Prof. Martin Schmitz mit Sabine Boger, Julia Bruinier, Philipp Glowacki, Johannes Kastner, Zhuo Ma, Gernot Mählmann, Viola Sommerfeld, He Wang.
