Gastvortrag: Pier Paolo Tamburelli über moderne Architektur.
21. Oktober 2025
16:15 - 18:00 Uhr
KU Linz: Hörsaal 1
The lecture series “(Re)Constructing Paradise: Religious and Transcultural Perspectives on Ideal Spaces" begins by introducing and critically examining both historical and contemporary approaches to architectural historiography. While traditional architectural history has long relied on western focussed systems of measurement, chronology, and hierarchy, global and postcolonial theories have challenged these frameworks by disrupting Western-centric narratives and evaluative models.
Pier Paolo Tamburelli is working on a research project that aims to define new criteria for evaluating modern architecture from a global perspective, with the goal of identifying “wonders of the modern world" as a contemporary counterpart to the ancient wonders.
Attendance is free - no registration required! / Eintritt frei - eine Anmeldung ist nicht erforderlich!
Wonders of the Modern World
Pier Paolo Tamburelli (Wien)
We all know that wonders do not exist anymore. That stuff belongs to a remote past. Nobody builds temples or colossal statues in 2025, right? And yet, to our bewilderment, these things are right here, in front of us. There are lots of them, and they’re very, very big.
The answer to the Western conservative asking ‘Why aren’t we building cathedrals anymore?’ is ‘Just take a look around you, moron.' The world, as a factory of large, inexplicable buildings, is not out of business. The sacred fire of monument-making is not extinguished. You just need to open your eyes. Every year, in the mourning period of Ashura, twenty-two million Shia pilgrims walk from Najaf to Karbala. Temporary installations are built all along the seventy-five-kilometre route. A new roof for the shrine of Imam Husayn was completed in 2017. Every year two million Tamil Hindus attend the Thaipusam festival at the Batu Caves in Kuala Lumpur. They climb 272 steps that lead to an opening into the tropical forest and then to a cave dotted with temples, where peacocks wander under stalactites. Every year five million Muslims attend the Bishwa Ijtema in Dhaka, where an immense white fabric roof is built to protect the faithful from the heat. Every year three million of Senegal’s Mourides travel to the Grand Magal in Touba. Every year in Munich a special set of immense tents is raised to host the Oktoberfest, first held to celebrate the wedding of a Bavarian king.
Still, we (Western architects doing ‘the international debate') do not look at wonders, we do not think they deserve consideration, we do not see them as an architectural opportunity, or at the very least as an architectural problem.
About the Speaker
Professor Dott arch Pier Paolo Tamburelli (born in Tortona, 1976) has taught at the Berlage Institute Rotterdam, at Harvard GSD, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, at Milan Politecnico, and he currently holds the chair of Design Theory at TU Vienna.
Tamburelli was one of the founders and editors of the architectural magazine “San Rocco". In 2022 he published “On Bramante" for MIT Press.