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Title:
Kracauer's Architecture : The ornamental nature of the new capitalist order

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Summary:
Siegfried Kracauer’s texts are a widely investigated field of sociology and media studies. It is less well known that Kracauer was a graduate architect, practised during World War I and was awarded his PhD after writing a thesis in 1915 in the field of architectural history. After the war, Kracauer published numerous critiques with a special focus on the architectural developments of the time. They document an interest in architectural phenomena ranging from a reflection on his own experiences to a general perspective on the subjectivity of the modern architect, as well as more universal social phenomena. In essence, this essay claims that the lack of ornamentation in modern architecture can be grasped as an ornamental concept of the new social order of capitalism.

Title:
Glass scenographies. Notes on spaces of one’s own

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In the first half of the 20th century, when architecture and literature dreamed of transparency, glass was the material these dreams were made of. However, the historiography of both fields usually focuses on a few canonical works by male authors to tell the story of this shared fascination. Departing from this imbalance, this essay takes the opportunity to explore the glass culture of modernity through the lens of female projects whose stories often take place simultaneously on different continents. While the former silent film actress Evelyn Word Leigh builds a glass house for herself in Nyack, New York, artists and writers based in Europe – like Claude Cahun, Anaïs Nin, and Hilda ‘H.D.’ Doolittle – flesh out imaginary glass domes as construction sites of artistic subjectivities. Whether homes or domes, these creative women used glass environments to question and renegotiate their assigned places in Western societies, challenging the boundaries of female agency.

Title:
A complicated organism. The architecture of the global Moravian network 1722–1922

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The modern Moravian Church is notable as an independent religious movement that for over two centuries developed a highly interconnected global network of settlements and mission stations. By 1800, close to 20 carefully planned Moravian communities had been established on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Part of the CCSA Topics series, ‘A Complicated Organism’ examines the role of architecture and spatial thinking in enabling the modern Moravians to perform their unique brand of organisational governance, aimed at establishing similar conditions in diverse environments scattered across an increasingly connected world.

Title:
Flooded by mail: How George Floyd (remember?) landed at the Tate

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The 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis led to the closure of the Tate Britain restaurant in London, which had advertised its 55-foot-long racist mural from the 1920s as "the most amusing room in Europe" Suddenly it was obvious. Flooded by Mail introduces strategies of antihegemonic amateur collecting and examines why the killing of a Black man by U.S. police in public implicates us in Europe. A number of objects found online are useful for this task: the trial minting of a coin commemorating the collapse of the Cologne City Archive that never entered circulation, a board game from a 1932 German film, stock photos and generic copperplate engravings from the same family over centuries, Köllnflocken trading cards, postcards from a wall in Morocco, a procession in Cologne and a possessed harbor in Spain, and a 1970s conceptualist installation with postcards of rough seas along the British coast.