Architectures and Counter-Architectures of Knowledge, c. 1970

Slought is pleased to announce Architectures and Counterarchitectures of Knowledge, c. 1970,, a talk by Tom Holert of the Harun Farocki Institut on Monday, April 29, 2019 from 6-8pm. Presented with the Temple University Department of Film and Media Arts, this event will explore the spatial and counter-spatial conditions of education and knowledge production in the US, Canada, and Europe during the 1960s and 1970s. It will be followed by a conversation with art historian Alexander Alberro.

Working towards an exhibition to be held at HKW in Berlin in Summer/Fall 2020-21, Holert, a Berlin-based art historian and curator, will talk about some of the case studies about to be included in Education Shock. Architectures and Technologies of Knowledge, 1957-1980. This research and exhibition project sets out to provide a revisionist reading of the post Sputnik crisis decades in terms of scientific and pedagogical knowledge production on a global scale. Following the launch of "Sputnik I" in October 1957 the West, and in particular the United States, embarked on a massive quest to regain lost terrain, not only in the realm of space exploration, but concerning education and research more generally. Combined with the necessity to respond to demographic and political change, education became the subject of massive expansion, with educational planning, architecture, and technology moving to the center of public and economical attention. As "progressive" as many of the designs and curricula, learning environments and research parks may have been understood and publicized—as embodiments of a biopolitics of a new type, serving the production of subjects for the new "knowledge economy," they met multiple resistance by radical, anti-institutional political, pedagogical, planning, and art practices.

The event will explore case studies including the "Philadelphia Parkway Program," an early instance of a project involving radical urban pedagogy at the high school level in the late 1960s and early 1970s; the Italian "Scuola e Quartiere" (School and neighborhood) movement that started in Florence in 1966 and lasted far into the 1970s; as well as the "Other Ways" project, a storefront radical teaching experiment in Berkeley, CA, initiated by educator Herbert R. Kohl and artist Allan Kaprow in 1969.