Architecture After the Rain: Cultural Trauma in a Post-Atomic Age

press release: Anthony Vidler, renowned cultural and architectural historian (Cooper Union, New York), will explore architectural, literary, and critical responses to war, trauma, and after-shock, from the 1930s to the present. (Lecture in Elvehjem L140 Wednesday Nov. 1 at 7:00 p.m.) The theories and practices of Surrealism and Counter –Surrealism will provide a foundation in the critical and psychoanalytical construction of, and influence on, post-atomic cultural practices during what the poet Auden called the “Age of Anxiety,” in the context of the present unwelcome return of such anxieties – nuclear, environmental, social, and political. Vidler is author of Histories of the Recent Present: Inventing Architectural Modernism (2009) and James Frazer Stirling: Notes from the Archive (2010); The Architectural Uncanny: Essays in the Modern Unhomely (1992) and Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (2000).