Invited Lecture for KU Leuven,
Leuven, Belgium, 5 January 2026.
Leuven, Belgium, 5 January 2026.
The lecture explores aspects of authorship in architecture through the lens of a new type of collective architectural producers—industrial companies, bureaucratic institutions and supranational organisations. I argue that this category provides an opportunity to focus not on the episodic, the architecture with a capital “A,” but on the systemic—buildings that surround us in everyday life, but rarely make it to architectural history books.
Through several examples of an industrial company, an international bureaucratic agency and a transnational organisation, this lecture makes the case for foregrounding the background. I argue that by shifting the focus from a single building and a single architect to a new type of architectural producer—an industrial company—it is possible to “enlarge” the discipline, while maintaining the focus on building and artefacts. This expanded focus allows students and researchers to incorporate perspectives from adjacent histories of construction and engineering, material processing, and the social sciences, reframing architecture as a collective practice and architectural history as a more polyphonic discipline, attentive to the voices of the many rather than the select few.