Lecture series on Construction History 2024
In spring 2024, VUB Architectural Engineering and the joint VUB–ULB research group Construction HistorieS Brussels (CHsB) hosted its annual online lecture series. This year, the lectures set out to explore how materials, energy and labour shape architectural and construction history.
Organised in the framework of the course Architectural and Construction History (before 1850), the series brought together students of Architectural Engineering (BA3) and Urban Studies (MA) with leading international scholars who rethink the built environment through flows, systems and the politics behind construction.
Jane Mah Hutton [February 29 2024]
The expanded relationships of the act of building. From material flows to labour movements.
Jane Mah Hutton opened the series by following the journey of granite paving blocks from quarries in coastal Maine to the streets of Manhattan, based on her book Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements.
Her lecture traced how seemingly inert materials are bound up with extractive landscapes and export infrastructures, the speeding up of circulation and capital in the city, and the formation of labour movements around quarry work and urban construction.
By reading streets and pavements as records of distant landscapes and human effort, she proposed a way of seeing material flows as “tethered to human hands”.
Sabine Barles [March 1 2024]
From circularity to linearity. The infrastructures of urban metabolism, 18th–20th centuries.
(This lecture was cancelled. The idea was to examine the long-term transformation of urban metabolism: how cities handle energy, materials, waste and resources. Focusing on European industrialising cities from the 18th to the 20th century, Barles intended to show how older, more circular regimes (where waste and by-products re-entered local cycles) gradually gave way to linear systems based on large-scale imports and distant disposal. By looking closely at infrastructures such as sewers, slaughterhouses, transport networks and waste systems, her lecture aimed to reveal how technical choices and planning decisions quietly rewired cities’ environmental footprint and reshaped what we now call “circularity”.)
Barnabas Calder [March 13 2024]
Emergency stop. A call for radical inaction.
Building on his book Architecture: From Prehistory to Climate Emergency, Barnabas Calder revisited architectural history through the lens of energy systems. In a recorded lecture (part of the StadsSalonsUrbains, see elsewhere on this website) followed by a live Q&A, he traced 14,000 years of building, from hunter-gatherer shelters and agrarian empires, to fossil-fuelled modernity, consumerism and the present climate emergency.
Calder argued that the built environment is the material trace of changing energy regimes, and that the last three centuries have seen an unprecedented surge in energy use for both constructing and operating buildings. At the same time, he pointed to low-carbon building traditions—past and present—as evidence that “zero-carbon” ways of living and building are not a utopian invention but a recoverable reality, inviting the audience to think in terms of radical restraint and “inaction” in construction.
Kiel Moe [March 28 2024]
Construction Ecology. Thinking about systems rather than objects.
In a recorded lecture, followed by a live Q&A, Kiel Moe introduced construction ecology as a way to understand buildings not as isolated objects, but as condensations of global material, energy and labour systems. Drawing on his book Unless and his work on the Seagram Building, he unpacked the vast chains of extraction, transport, processing and labour that make a single “iconic” building possible, the uneven geographies of overdevelopment and underdevelopment embedded in such projects, and the need for more literal, system-aware descriptions of architecture.
Moe argued that re-situating architecture within its planetary context—across scales, from the molecular to the territorial—opens up both a more honest critique of modern construction and new possibilities for ecological and social responsibility in design.
About the series
The 2024 lecture series on Architectural and Construction History was coordinated by prof. Stephanie Van de Voorde as part of the VUB/ULB programmes Bachelor in Architectural Engineering and Master in Urban Studies.