Armillary Lectures: Gili Merin

GILI MERIN
TOWARDS JERUSALEM: THE ARCHITECTURE OF PILGRIMAGE

Gili Merin is an architect and photographer based in Vienna. She holds a PhD from the AA in London and had studied architecture at the Bezalel Academy in Jerusalem, the UdK in Berlin, and the Waseda University of Tokyo. Her doctoral dissertation ‘Towards Jerusalem: The Architecture of Pilgrimage’ (supervised by Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S. Giudici) explores structures of spiritual travel using photography as a design tool. In 2018, the thesis won the annual AA writing prize; in 2023, it was awarded the Graham Foundation Grant and will be published as the book “Analogous Jerusalem” (Humboldt Books, 2024). Formerly the head of history and theory of architecture at the Royal College of Arts (RCA) and a Diploma Unit Master at the AA, Gili currently holds a Post-Doc position at the TU Vienna and is a lecturer at the Negev School of Architecture in Be’er Sheva. She lectured, participated in panels, and led workshops at various institutions, amongst them the Harvard GSD, the MoMA, the CCA, EPFL, and the Universities of Syracuse, Porto, Aarhus, Rice, Carelton, and Aalto. She was trained as an architect and researcher at OMA in Rotterdam and Kuehn Malvezzi in Berlin. Her photographs have been exhibited in a number of exhibitions and publications worldwide, including the Venice Architecture Biennale, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, HKW in Berlin, the Rotterdam Biennale and the Seoul Biennale for Urbanism. Her writings and reportages have been translated into German, French, Spanish, Russian and Portuguese; she has been published in several journals including the Economist, the AA Files, MIT’s Thresholds, Plat Journal, The Guardian, Apollo Magazine, The Architects’ Journal, and the Architectural Review.

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 to invite researchers who have already obtained a Ph.D. to present their dissertations to an audience of Ph.D. candidates, providing a diverse array of examples and case studies on approaching dissertation work within the field of architecture.