PhD Scholarship, History of Architecture, KU Leuven
The Department of Architecture at the KU Leuven engages in research on architecture, interior architecture, urbanism and spatial planning, conducted at the Faculty of Engineering Science (Leuven) and the Faculty of Architecture (Brussels and Ghent campuses). The Department is an international centre of expertise in these domains and has about 140 (international) doctoral students.
The research group Perspectives on Architecture from the Distant Past (PADP) brings together scholars from the KU Leuven Department of Architecture based in Leuven, Brussels and Ghent. The PADP members study various aspects of the architectural legacy of the distant past, including the imagery of spaces and the study of literary and other textual sources. They do so from an indispensable interdisciplinary background that is also rooted in cultural studies, philosophy and literature.
Project:
Throughout the nineteenth century, exhibition spaces like museums, collections, but also gardens or secluded landscapes, were intrinsically connected with catalogues, treatises, labels in showcases or with procès-verbaux. They were essentially spatio-textual. The same goes for their objects. The museum for example, which plays a paradigmatic role in this respect, did not ‘find’ the objects it accommodated. It created those objects by turning displaced fragments into ‘documents’. These ‘documents’ would however remain mute without some sort of comprehensive framework, a wholeness or re-enactment, through in-situ or in-context display. The museum and its object-document thus negotiated the ambiguous relationship, throughout the century, between fragments, displaced from an original, absent or disappeared context and the re-enactment or vivification of that context.