Insights

From 2023, current events of our Research Training Group will be available on Instagram and Facebook. We announce important events in our Newsletter. The audio recordings of many lectures can be found in our Podcast. From now on, our social media offering will replace the Insights section.

September 1-10/2022

More than two decades have passed since the last Balkan war, and the territory of the former multi-ethnic state is divded up by the borders of new nation states. With its research trip to Northern Macedonia, Kosovo and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the Research Training Group “Identity and Heritage” focuses on places, things and people that can inform ways of dealing with cultural heritage that is contested or has become meaningless in the present. What pasts have left traces in the urban spaces of Skopje, Pristina and Sarajevo? What are the challenges of coexistance and of the finding of common narratives, and who are the people who face these questions?

With deep dismay and sorrow, we mourn our highly esteemed colleague Prof Dr-Ing Hermann Schlimme, who tragically died in Italy on 6 August 2023. Hermann Schlimme had been a member of the research training group “Identity and Heritage” since his nomination to the Professorship of Building and Urban Development History at the TU Berlin in 2017, and as such he co-supervised several dissertations. With his broad expertise and his thoughtful and well-worded contributions to discussions, he has significantly enriched the research training group.

After studying architecture and completing his doctorate at the TU Braunschweig with a thesis on the early modern church facades of the city of Rome, Hermann Schlimme was a research assistant at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome from 1998 to 2016. At first responsible for construction surveys and documentation as an assistant, he also made a significant contribution to the development of digital recording procedures of architectural drawings. He remained connected to the topic of digitisation beyond this, for example in a cooperation project with the Beijing Tsinghua Institute for Digitization from 2013 onwards to record the Old Summer Palace Yuanmingyuan in Beijing. Until recently, he was also involved in the project baureka.online – Research Repository, Catalogue and Archive for Architectural History and Building Archaeology.

From 2002, in cooperation with the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, he led his own research project “Knowledge History of Architecture”, which resulted in his habilitation at the TU Vienna in 2015, where he had been teaching since 2006, as well as a three-volume publication edited together with Jürgen Renn and Wilhelm Osthues. As a university lecturer, Hermann Schlimme was also open to new topics and new approaches, such as the book “Berliner Architekt*innen. Oral History”, published two years ago together with Sarah Rivière. 

The gap that Hermann Schlimme’s completely unexpected death leaves in the teaching and research of the history of architecture, building technology and knowledge is correspondingly large. He now rests in his chosen home of Rome on the Cimitero Acattolico near the great architectural historians Richard Krautheimer, Wolgang Lotz and Christoph Thoenes. The members of the Research Training Group “Identity and Heritage” will keep Hermann Schlimme in grateful memory.

The registration for the 6th annual conference of the Research Training Group in the Architekturforum at the Technische Universität Berlin is online! This year’s conference focuses on the research objects of our PhD researchers. How are things ascribed symbolic meaning, and often multiple and potentially conflicting meaning? How are narratives that inform heritage references linked to such things? What role do things play in the formation of new or as yet under-recognised constructs of heritage?

The DFG Research Training Group invites its guests to raise such open theoretical questions. The conference is not only a space in which to present research outcomes, but also a forum for reviewing established research approaches, contexts, and situations. The standard lecture format is complemented by a poster-exhibition on the objects being researched by the Research Training Group, which takes place in the foyer next to the Architekturforum.

To attend the conference “Connectings Things” please register free of charge here.

The conflicts concerning cultural heritage in Bosnia, Kosovo and Macedonia are in the focus of this lecture series. The politics of history around architectures, monuments, urban planning and archives in the region of former Yugoslavia are shaped by the memories of the socialist heritage, its national prehistories and the interventions of NATO in the 1990s.
Furthermore, our guests will talk about the technologies of knowledge tradition, Congo’s colonial past, the memory of the Holocaust in social media and the appropriation of history in re-enactments. All lectures are open to the public.

Find more information about our guests and the lecture topics.

On 1 October 2022 the third cohort will begin its work at the Berlin and Weimar locations. We received applications on contemporary issues in cultural heritage research from Iran, Iraq, Honduras, India, Sweden, Spain, Malta, Mexico, China, Colombia, Peru, Austria, Turkey, Syria, USA, Malta, Finland, Kosovo, Italy, Poland, Brazil, South Africa, Egypt and Germany. We are delighted about the international interest in our college and the exciting research topics. We thank all applicants!

Mehr als 120 Teilnehmer:innen aus 13 Ländern haben sich für die 5. Jahrestagung des Graduiertenkollegs angemeldet. Trotz der aktuell hohen Infektionszahlen der COVID-19 Pandemie in Thüringen kann die Tagung in Präsenz vom 25.-26. November 2021 in Weimar nach der 2G-Regelung stattfinden und im Livestream verfolgt werden.