9th Biannual Meeting of the European Architectural Historian Network (EAHN) at Aarhus University, 17-21 June 2026
Session: Building Science. The City as a Site and Object of Knowledge-Making in the Early Modern Period
Chair: Jun.-Prof. Christine Beese (Ruhr University Bochum, Germany)
The session aimed to shed light on the city as a contact zone and as a subject and object of making, circulating, implementing, and institutionalising knowledge in the early modern period. In order to gain insights into the reciprocal process that both practically and theoretically shaped the city and situated architecture within a broader field of knowledge-making, the session touched upon the following topics:
- Institutions of knowledge production and their urban and social context (e.g. guilds, universities, academies)
- Urban space and architecture as an object and laboratory of transdisciplinary knowledge production (e.g. excavations, surveys, hygiene)
- The city as a contact zone across different fields and cultures of knowledge (e.g. natural and political philosophy, mathematics, medicine, arts and crafts)
- Conceptualizations and representations of the built city (e.g. as models of social order, in terms of territorial or cultural affiliation)
Programme:
- Nicole Falconi-Müller (PhD candidate at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany): Surgeons and Architects as Collaborators: The Construction of the Anatomical Theatre in Barcelona,1760 1764
- Dr. Davide Martino (Post-Doc researcher at Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium): Terraqueous Cities: The Early Modern Art of Governing Water
- Dr. Giedrė Jarulaitienė (Cultural Heritage Manager, Drammen Municipality, Norway): Johan Daniel Berlin – Architect of Urban Enlightenment
- Nötges, Marc (PhD candidate in Architectural Theory at TU Kaiserslautern, Germany): Imagined Cities, Model worlds: Fiction, Knowledge and the Early Modern City
