Myth of an Architect: How Architectural History Lies to Us About Great Architects – Ladislav Jackson

Dr. Ladislav Jackson will be joining the School of Architecture to give a talk about the role of biographies and the mythology surrounding great architects, on Friday, October 21st, as part of the Graduate Lecture Series. An architect’s biography still remains – after all the waves of deconstruction of the architectural history in the 20th and the 21st century – a foundation stone in the field. However, the genre has developed certain narrative strategies that deform and complicate our understanding of what it meant to become a modern architect, sustain the privileged position, what were the conditions and the commonplace of their work and what networks they needed to establish. The talk will focus on what tools we have today for recognition of these disproportions and stereotypes that we inherited, how we can avoid them in the process of writing future biographies of “great” architects and if the genre is even relevant for the future.

Jackson is an assistant professor at the Department of Art History and Theory at the Brno University of Technology, teaching global and local 20th Century art history, gender and queer studies in the visual culture and critical race theory in relations to visual arts and design. He authored multiple books on the 20 th Century architectural and design history, namely Jan Kotěra (1871–1923) and his work (lately Myth of an Architect: Jan Kotěra 150), he has an ongoing research on Jaroslav J. Polívka (1886–1960) and his cooperation with Frank Lloyd Wright and his book Images of Queer Desire is about to be published in 2023.