Mud on the Floor. Dirty Realities in Scholarly Work / EDAR, THEMA

The public lecture series Mud on the Floor looks at methods for studying construction sites. Although construction is required for architecture and cities to be built, it can be notably absent from scholarship. There are a few institutional reasons for this (architectural history developing as a subset of art history, for example) but also structural reasons for it: as ephemeral, chaotic, and literally dirt-y sites, construction can challenge our neat scholarly frames and methods.
The presentations will be from architects, historians, and anthropologists. The series encourages that we as scholars spend more time in the field or in the archives of the construction site as a way of bringing a bit more “mud” back into our institutions and, in doing so, better taking on questions of working conditions, improvisation, tacit knowledge, and even uncertainty, to name just a few of the ways that looking at construction can enrich our research work.

16 October / 12:30-14:00  / Jesse Honsa, KU Leuven
Construction Drawing: Retracing the Roles of an Early 20th Century British Contractor
This talk introduces drawing as an investigative tool. Architectural drawings do not only communicate information, but create it: compiling, scrutinizing, charting, comparing, and hypothesizing from existing sources. Such methods are especially relevant in a particularly resource-scarce and messy area of historical research: construction history. The lecture focuses on one building firm: John Laing & Son, a large-scale builder of garden cities and settlements in the early twentieth century, using drawings to piece together construction sites, details, projects and work relationships. The scale and scope of Laing’s vertically-integrated organization redefined normative roles such as ‘contractor,’ ‘unskilled worker,’ ‘developer,’ and ‘architect.’

Mud on the Floor is coordinated by Sarah Nichols (THEMA Lab) and represents the 2024 SCHOLARS in Transition public lecture series. This established EDAR annual series of lectures aims at giving a voice to contemporary scholars who, within their ongoing research activity, are experiencing a « transition » condition: their contribution to new and emerging research topics, and to tentative interpretations and unconventional approaches, marks the intersection of their personal research agendas, the evolution of their discipline, the public debate, and the availability of sources and data.