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  The Warburg Renaissance

  1 October 2024 sees the reopening of the Warburg Institute in London following its renovation during the Warburg Renaissance Project, 2018–2024. The launch includes the final installation of the Warburg Models exhibition, created by Tim Anstey and Mari Lending and previously shown at the Warburg Haus, Hamburg (2023) and the Architectural Association, London (2024), within the Warburg Institute itself. The opening includes the launch of the book, The Warburg Renaissance: Rebuilding the Institute, edited by Tim Anstey together with Bill Sherman, director of the Warburg Institute and Dan Tassell, Associate Partner of Haworth Tompkins Architects.

  Book launch

  Oct 1—1, 2024
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  The Warburg Renaissance: Rebuilding the Institute

  The Warburg Renaissance: Rebuilding the Institute by Tim Anstey, Bill Sherman and Dan Tassel (eds.) traces the story of the major renovation made to the 1958 Warburg Institute on Woburn Square in London, completed as the Warburg Renaissance Project, 2018–2024. This was to be the fifth in a series of architectural reconfigurations of the institute established by Aby Warburg since the creation of its first home, the Kunstwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg (KBW), in Hamburg in 1926. The Warburg Renaissance was to emulate the collaboration between architect and institute, and the alliance of architectural and intellectual organisation, that characterised the series of buildings. The project was commissioned by the University of London and the Warburg Institute with design by Haworth Tompkins Architects.

  Book

  Published Oct 1, 2024
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  Things That Move: A Hinterland in Architectural History

  We tend to think of architecture as a practice in permanence, but what if we looked instead for an architecture of transience? Things That Move: A Hinterland in Architectural History does just that: rather than assuming that architecture is, at a certain level, stationary, the book considers how architecture moves subjects (referring to its emotive potential in the experience it creates); how it moves objects (referring to how it choreographs bodies in motion); and how it is itself moved (referring to the mixture of materials, laws, affordances, and images that introduce movement into any architectural condition). The first of the three sections, “Cargoes,” highlights the mobile peripheries of architectural history through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It asks what kinds of knowledge can be included in a discussion of architecture, noting the connections between discourses of the lithe and the technical, on the one hand, and those associated with the production of monumental, static compositions on the other. The second section, “Dispatches,” reinterprets early architectural theory by examining the Renaissance ideal of decorum, the nature of the architectural work, and the ways in which architects are constituted as authors. The last part of the book, “Vehicles,” considers building in terms of literal and metaphorical movement, using two cases from the twentieth century that investigate the relationship between architecture and cultural memory. Using a broadly forensic approach to connect details in otherwise disparate cases, Things That Move provides a capacious architectural account that will change the way readers understand buildings, their becoming, and their significance.

  Endorsements:
  “What a feast! Things That Move advances a very profound argument about what we talk about when we talk about architecture, and does so with delicious, page-turning narrative brio. A book to be at once devoured and savored.”
  —Richard Wittman, Associate Professor, University of California at Santa Barbara

  “Things That Move develops a completely original exploration of architecture as concerned with movement, time, and memory. It uncovers the unexplored regions of naval architecture, the architecture of obelisk transportation, or the mnemonic power of automotive vehicles, to argue that architecture is not about solidity but about flux; and about transportation in time and place. It is a fascinating read, full of new insights that will completely change perceptions of Vitruvian theory and modernism.”
  —Caroline van Eck, Professor of Art History, Cambridge University

  “In this groundbreaking work, Tim Anstey examines architecture through the themes of motion, movement, and relocation. He presents this story through meticulously researched historical episodes recounting the shipping of obelisks to early mass transport hubs. The subject is original, the writing superb. Anstey is a witty and provocative guide through the unfamiliar, unfixed reaches of architecture.”
  —Barbara Penner, Professor of Architectural Humanities, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL

  Book

  Published Apr 30, 2024
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• Warburg Models, AA London

  Warburg Models: The Architecture of the Itinerant Archive opened at the Architectural Association on 18th January 2024. Here the Warburg models moved from the powerful elliptical space that had characterized the heart of the Warburg Institute’s 1920s home in Hamburg into the linear space of the Architectural Association gallery, a room not dissimilar in its proportions to that of the Institute’s first research space in Thames House in London. Aspects of the Hamburg display moved with the models, and the gallery in London presented hyper-detailed portraits of the display panels used in the elliptical space of the Warburg-Haus presented the archive material and architectural drawings on which the Warburg Models project was based. In London the Warburg Models were set in the context of an equally stunning exhibit on the history of the AA’s own lantern-slide collection, assembled during the 1890s. Bespoke furniture commissioned for the exhibition in London, and inspired by the designs developed for the Warburg Models exhibition at Blaker (2021), presented facsimile material for both exhibitions.

  Exhibition

  Jan 18—Mar 7, 2024
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• Warburg Models, Warburg-Haus, Hamburg

  Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge at the Warburg-Haus, Hamburg is the second exhibition in a sequence of three editions, beginning with Warburg Models at Blaker, Guttormgaards Arkiv, outside Oslo in May 2021 and ending with Warburg Models: Institutes and Archives, at the Architectural Association, London (18 January– 7 March 2024).

  Each model in the exhibition presents an architectural project that was seminal for the intellectual development of Aby Warburg himself, for the individuals who curated his legacy (particularly Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing), and for the conceptualisation of Warburg’s famous library. The models are constructed at 1:75 scale and perform as monochrome sculptures suggesting the centrality of colour to the systems of orientation and organization that were developed for the library. Fulfilling Warburg’s desire to create a library in which individual books could be relocated into differing constellations depending on changing lines of research interest, Saxl and Bing adopted a system of categories, identified by single letters, matched by fourteen colours spread across the palette from burnt umber to near white and from sangria to aquamarine. In their flexible cataloguing system each volume in the Warburg collection, regardless of provenance, carried colour strips on its spine, allowing its potential allocation to a complex series of thematic constellations. The Warburg Models each take one of these colours as a datum, producing hyper-detailed descriptions, from building structure and architectural detail to chairs and book lamps, in various materials sprayed with a single hue.

  Staged in the hallway and in the iconic Lese- und Vortragssaal at the Warburg-Haus, the models are displayed on plinths inspired by Warburg and Saxl’s exhibition designs. Cloth-covered panels hang within the curved wall of bookshelves that surrounds the elliptical reading room, showing archival material pertaining to this Warburgian architecture, a reinscription of the system originally used to display Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.

  Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge is the result of an AHO Architectural graduate seminar run during 2020 and 2021, taught by Tim Anstey and Mari Lending.

  
  

  Exhibition

  Nov 30, 2023
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  Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge

  Architecture and interiors were crucial for Aby Warburg’s interrogation of culture, a focus that was at once intellectual, visceral, historical, and contemporary. As well as exploring how architecture had shaped systems of cultural orientation in the past, Warburg and his followers were involved a continual process of architectural commissioning in the present. Between 1923 and 1958 designs were initiated for a collection of buildings, interiors, and exhibitions, as the Warburg Library moved through a series of homes, first in Hamburg and then in London. All these projects provided opportunities for expressing the relationship between architecture, intellectual order, and memory.

  Warburg Models: Buildings as Bilderfahrzeuge sheds new light on Warburg’s involvement with architecture, portraying six building projects from archival material. Detailed architectural models made by students at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and accompanying contributions from Dag Erik Elgin, Uwe Fleckner, Elizabeth Sears, Bill Sherman, and Claudia Wedepohl, show how architectural repetition, reinscription, and movement shaped a seminal research institution.

  “The buildings that housed Aby Warburg’s library were designed by some of the most prominent Modernists, and employed the latest in communication and information techniques. This original and beautiful book reconstructs the architectural journey of the Warburg Institute, adding a new dimension to the disciplinary insights developed there: the vehicular migration of images across time and place.”

  Caroline van Eck
  Professor of Art History, University of Cambridge

  Book

  Published Nov 1, 2023
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• Warburg Models at Blaker

  Architecture, interiors and technological systems were crucial for how Aby Warburg and his followers interrogated culture. In Warburg’s native Hamburg a purpose designed building, the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, was completed in 1926 to accommodate his remarkable library and to disseminate the ideas it generated. In the same year a transformation was initiated to create a Planetarium for Hamburg in a disused water tower, a project that would demonstrate Warburg’s radical theories about how travelling images carried fragments of antique reality into modernity. When the Warburg Institute transferred to London in 1933, this fascination with architectural organisation continued through projects designed by the avant-garde architectural group Tecton to house the institute and its directors during the 1930s, in the creation of successful exhibitions during the 1940s and in the construction of the library’s present home at Woburn Square, Bloomsbury in the 1950s.

  Through six models at 1:75 scale, the exhibition shows how the Warburg scholars projected a tie between their own occupancy of architectural space and their shared ideas about intellectual order and cultural survival. The models are colour coded with the Modernist palette of colours used by the Warburg Institute to organise its collection of books according to “the rule of the good neighbour”. Each model emphasizes a certain architectural aspect of the building portrayed. The Warburg models will be shown in Blaker outside Oslo, Hamburg, London, and New York (2021–24).

  The exhibition is part of the research project Re-inscribing the Warburg Institute at OCCAS (the Oslo Centre for Critical Architectural Studies), AHO. The graduate seminar Warburg Models is conducted by professors Tim Anstey and Mari Lending. The models are built by Pernille Ahlgren, Christian Berg, Amalie Elvegård, Nora Kilstad, Anne Lise Ladegård, Pål Sanchez-Paredes, Silje Seim, Cathrine Sundem, Maximilian Svendsen, Karina Tang, and Mara Trübenbach.

  Exhibition

  May 1—30, 2021
  Read more about Warburg Models at Blaker