Armillary Lecture: Bernadette Krejs – Instagram Wohnen

INSTAGRAM WOHNEN – ARCHITECTURE AS IMAGE AND THE SEARCH FOR COUNTER-HEGEMONIC IMAGERIES OF HOUSING
What impact does the media representation of aestheticized visual worlds of living on platforms like Instagram have on the understanding of architecture and the domestic space? The dominant image narratives of the Home on Instagram fail to capture the complexity of living, yet these visual ideals of living also find built translations and connections. Instagram Wohnen analyses what counter-hegemonic images can achieve as politically activist images for housing. In the tense relationship between image and architecture, the research focuses on alternative (image) possibilities for more diversity, resistance, and community – and offers impulses for dealing with digital and media-mediated images.

BERNADETTE KREJS (PHD) is an architect and researcher based at Vienna University of Technology. Her work is situated in a transdisciplinary research field between architecture, housing and visual culture. She works on various research projects in the field of spatial production (Housing discourse space Vienna (2019 – 2021)) and is co-editor and author of numerous books. (Instagram-Wohnen (2023). As co-editor of ARCH+ 244 Vienna: The End of Housing (as a Typology), (Spektor Books 2024), she was awarded with the Bruno Kreisky Prize for the Political Book 2022. She is Margarete Schütte Lihotzky Project Fellow 2023. In 2024 she co-launched the international and interdisciplinary Doctoral Program New Social Housing. She is part of the queer-feminist collective Claiming*Spaces and co-founded the activist research practice Palace of Un/Learning where she collaborated with various institutions, including Fundació Mies van der Rohe Barcelona, Oslo Architecture Triennale, Irish Architecture Foundation Dublin, Design Academy Eindhoven, UMPRUM Prague and DAZ – Deutsches Architektur Zentrum Berlin.

ON THE LECTURE SERIES:
Armillary spheres are “models of the celestial globe constructed from rings and hoops representing the equator, the tropics, and other celestial circles, and able to revolve on its axis.” This lecture series wants to be a window onto the sphere of academic research, gazing at the different constellations drawn by doctoral dissertations within the horizon of architecture. The course aims at inviting researchers that already obtained a PhD to present their dissertation to an audience of doctorands, providing a diverse array of examples and case studies on approaching dissertation work within the field of architecture.