At a time when universities are flashpoints of social justice and the repression of protest, where students’ calls for change and answerability are met with unblinking neoliberal logic and police action, this ongoing series of three artist books evaluates the modernist architecture, curricular and social design, and idea of the university from the early 1960s to today.
With the centenary of Canadian architect Arthur Erickson’s birth, his buildings and the social imagination of architecture are being reevaluated. Encountering Educational Modernism situates Erickson’s 1972 University of Lethbridge campus –his most unique public building – within the golden era of global university expansion to pose critical questions regarding the relationship of architecture, knowledge and the idea of the student in the late sixties.
Erickson was active in the international discussion of universities in that period and the historical moment, shaped by local and national politics, allowed Erickson to test his ideas at the University of Lethbridge campus, set in the spectacular landscape of the Oldman River in southern Alberta on traditional Blackfoot land. In distinction to contemporary campuses, Erickson’s linear plan aimed at an active spatial democracy, at the breakdown of the separation of student and faculty and the shattering of distinct spaces for disciplinary knowledges.
Using the concept of the encounter, Jeff Derksen identifies three crucial spatial and educational encounters: encounters for and by students; encounters between forms of knowledge; and the encounter of architecture with site. Together, these encounters form a spatial legacy and produce a counter-temporality to the value theory of education in neoliberal management. The educational encounter that Erickson sought to spark removes students from a narrow degree path and believes in unpredictable encounters as the most dynamic form of education, invention, and sociability. This legacy of architectural space and educational temporality is alive in the design of the University of Lethbridge.
Framed with an interview with architectural historian Victoria Baster and illustrated with archival architectural drawings, curricular material, and contemporary photographs, Encounter Educational Modernism, is a vital critical document on the spaces and potential of universities. Bitter and Weber’s artistic video “Public Seminar”, realised in collaboration with current students, brings the 1960s potential of the building in dialogue with the experience of a university education today.
April 1, 2025, 7:00pm
With Critical Image Forum
Sabine Bitter and Jeff Derksen
Respondents: Althea Thauberger and Roxanne Panchasi
School for the Contemporary Arts, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada
May 7, 2025, 6:00pm
Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber
Introduction: Arne Zerbst, respondent: Christian Teckert
Studiengang Raumstrategien, Muthesius Kunsthochschule
Legienstrasse 35, Kiel, Germany
May 9, 2025, 7:30pm
Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber
Respondents: Dagmar Pelger and Kathrin Wildner
Pro qm Bookshop
Almstadtstraße 48, Berlin, Germany
May 13, 2025, 7:00pm
Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber
HFBK Hamburg, Art Education
Wartenau Assembly #26
Aula Wartenau
Wartenau 15, Hamburg, Germany
May 19, 2025, 5:00pm
Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber
Klasse Prof. Sandra Schäfer
Akademie der Bildenden Künste München
Akademiestraße 2 – 4, Munich, Germany
June 2, 2025, 7:00pm
Sabine Bitter, Jeff Derksen, Helmut Weber
With Maja Lorbek on Transnational School Construction
Austrian Society for Architecture (ÖGFA)
Moderator: Michael Klein
Kohlenrutsche
Am Tabor 29, Vienna, Austria
