** Masterclass with Dr. Wolfgang Förster, Head of the Department for Housing Research and International Relations, Vienna, Austria **
Thursday, 9 May from 5.30pm in Hunter Building Lecture Theatre 

 

The New Tenement: Tradition and modernity

Friday, 10 May 2013 10.00 – 20.00
Mackintosh Building, Glasgow School of Art, 167 Renfrew Street, Glasgow G3 6RQ

Organised by the Mackintosh School of Architecture (Glasgow School of Art) in partnership with the Scottish Centre for Conservation Studies (University of Edinburgh) and DOCOMOMO-International (ISC Urbanism + Landscape), with support from the Architectural Heritage Society of Scotland (AHSS)

The tenement has been ‘reinvented’ all over Europe since the 1970s. The conference will focus on the renaissance of this widespread and, until recently, very controversial housing type, which for the purpose of this conference will be defined as dense flatted residences on a street block plan. Tenements are particularly prominent in Scottish cities and have been a symbolic battleground in the long-running confrontation of ‘history’ and ‘modernity’ in the built environment. There, and in many other European countries, nineteenth-century tenements inspired a variety of new buildings that adapted features such as perimeter block plans, variations of small-scale design, multifunctional spaces, and regional aesthetics to contemporary uses and preferences – in the process synthesising elements of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity.’

While the New Tenement is now widely accepted as a desirable dwelling-type, the new visions of the city and its inhabitants are subject of ongoing debates. This includes questions of difference and local identity as well as ideas about self-responsibility, civic engagement, and bourgeois values as opposed to the state paternalism and equal living conditions that had been inherent in the ‘high modernist’ formulae of the 1950s and 1960s. Against this background, the conference will contextualise the international ‘tenement renaissance’ since the 1970s and its continuation today.

Organisers
Prof Miles Glendinning (DOCOMOMO/University of Edinburgh) m.glendinning@ed.ac.uk,
Prof Florian Urban (Mackintosh School of Architecture) f.urban@gsa.ac.uk
Other contacts:
Dr Ruxandra-Iulia Stoica (University of Edinburgh), research and organisation r.stoica@ed.ac.uk
Dr Ambrose Gillick (Mackintosh School of Architecture), research and organisation a.gillick@gsa.ac.uk
Simon Green (Architectural Heritage Society Scotland) Simon.Green@rcahms.gov.uk

PRORGAMME: http://thenewtenement2013.wordpress.com/

The conference is FREE, but ticketed. Further information and advance bookings: Ambrose Gillick,  a.gillick@gsa.ac.uk