Photo by Danya Bateman

Closing this Fall Series, the School of Architecture and Planning at the Catholic University of America will be presenting the lecture “Mies van der Rohe: A Negative Theology” by Professor Thomas Mical, November 20th at 6:00pm. Professor Mical will reflect upon tactics of negation, absence, and a focus upon subtractive processes within the architecture and legacy of Mies van der Rohe, while drawing upon the under-examined spiritual context of the avant-garde recodings of historical and technological forces driving modernity. The lecture reinterprets Mies van der Rohe later glass, concrete, and steel design provocations as an incomplete negation, with details persisting as hosts of telling traces or minimal differences exposed in the historical turbulence of the twentieth century. Modern architecture after Mies is repurposed as a demonstration of what must remain almost hidden and nearly silent within the spatial arenas of modern transparency. Thomas Mical is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of South Australia, where he does research in the history of modern thought in architecture. He has published widely on surrealism, transparency, and cinematic urbanism and taught in several universities in the U.S. and internationally, including the Illinois Institute of Technology, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Carleton University, and the Vienna University of Technology. The lecture will be at the Koubek Auditorium, Crough Center for Architectural Studies, The Catholic University of America, 620 Michigan Ave. N.E. Washington D.C. All are welcomed.