Jörg H. Gleiter | Reversed Utopia and the Anthropocene

Jörg H. Gleiter
Reversed Utopia and the Anthropocene
A new conception of time is a reliable sign of the new era. As in the transition to modernity, the relationship between future, present and past is changing again today. This has to do with the change in the cultural memory, but also with the Anthropocene, with the crisis of the Earth system and the technological possibilities for simulating the future. In contrast to the great utopias of the 19th and 20th centuries, today algorithms simulate the distant future mostly as a disaster scenario. As imagined futures, these tend to act back on current cultural practices. We can speak of a reverse utopia, where the immediate future is no longer simply in front of us, but shows itself as a mediated future, namely as the past of a fictitious, simula-ted distant future. The lecture thematizes the changes in the understanding of time as a sign of a historical epochal turn.

Jörg H. Gleiter (Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil., M. S., BDA) is an architect, professor of architectural the-ory and the managing director of the Institute for Architecture, Technische Universität Berlin. He has studied architecture at TU Berlin, IUAV (Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia) and Columbia University in New York (M.S. in Advanced Architectural Design, 1992).
He holds a PhD in architectural theory and a Habilitation in philosophy of architecture, both from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. He has worked as an architect at Eisenman Architects (New York), Leeser Architecture (New York) and at various architectural offices in Italy and Germany. He held positions as professor of aesthetics at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy (2005-12), deputy professor of design and architectural theory at Bauhaus-Universi-tät Weimar (2005-07), professor of philosophy of architecture at Waseda University in Tokyo (2003-05) and visiting professor at IUAV in Venice (2003). Among his books: Architekturtheo-rie zur Einführung, Junius, Berlin 2022; Traditionelle Theorie. 1863 bis 1938. Architekturtheorie Grundlagen, DOM Publisher, 2018; Urgeschichte der Moderne (Prehistory of Modernity) Biele-feld, 2010); Der philosophische Flaneur. Nietzsche und die Architektur (The Philosophical Flaneur – Nietzsche and Architecture) Würzburg, 2009; Architekturtheorie heute (Architecture Theory Today) Bielefeld, 2008.

The seminar will take place within the Aesthetics for the city and landscape II / integrated course Preserving heritage and shaping new urban features lab i.c.