Lecture series by DAVIDE DERIU at TASKISLA-ITU, 134

Lecture 1 - The city in the field of aerial vision – 08.06.2010, 12:30

The lecture will explore the impact of aerial visuality on the image of the modern city. A broad historical sweep, ranging from the imaginary bird’s-eye views of the Renaissance down to the age of the camera, will show a variety of ways in which cities have been historically seen and comprehended from the air. The lecture will focus in particular on the advent of photography and will discuss the aesthetics and politics of representation that emerged in the early twentieth century, when architecture became closely intertwined with mass media.


Lecture 2 - Picturing Modern Ankara: ‘New Turkey’ in Western Imagination - 09.06.2010, 12:30

Much has been written about the involvement of European artists, architects and planners in the making of modern Ankara. But how was this extraordinary event viewed from the West? At a critical historical juncture, in which the geopolitical space of the Orient was being radically reconfigured, Ankara provided an unexpected terrain of cross-cultural encounters between East and West. The lecture discusses a range of impressions of Ankara that were registered by travel writers and other authors in the early Republican period, so as to question how literature shaped the western perception of ‘New Turkey’.

Seminar 3 – Reading Pamuk’s Istanbul - 10.06.2010, 12:30

Subject of an extensive discussion in Turkey as well as abroad, the work of Orhan Pamuk raises a number of critical issues to those concerned with architecture and the city. This seminar proposes some possible interpretative keys that will serve to open up a debate about Pamuk’s literary depictions of Istanbul, with particular reference to issues of memory, identity, and urban experience.

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Davide Deriu is a Post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Architecture at the University of Westminster, London. He graduated in architecture from Politecnico di Torino, Italy, and specialised in history and theory at the Bartlett, University College London. He has been a research fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, and taught at METU Ankara as well as UCL and various other universities in Britain. His main research interests lie at the intersection between architectural history and visual culture, with a focus on urban representations in photography, film, and literature. Ongoing projects include a book on urbanism and the aerial imaginary and an edited issue of the London Journal entitled ‘Eyes over London’. He is also co-organising the forthcoming international conference ‘Emerging Landscapes: Between Production and Representation’ at the University of Westminster (25-27 June 2010).