HAUP 10th Anniversary

A few days after her arrival at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) in August 2014, Carola Hein stood in the History floor overlooking the iconic orange staircase of the faculty building on one side and the Bouwpub on the other. The workspaces of the Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning were completely empty. Wondering whether she had made the right decision to move the family across the ocean from the United States back to Europe, she pondered if and when colleagues would be settling in, what direction their shared research would take and how to organize the education in a school of architecture.

In over 15 years as a professor at a liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, she had developed research and education from an interdisciplinary perspective with a focus on bachelor’s degree students. Highlights of that work were the 360o Program, a cluster of courses from across the curriculum that connected students and faculty to collectively explore contemporary challenges and opportunities for research and education on topics such as Perspectives on Sustainability, Disaster and Rebuilding in Japan and Space and Identity. Trained in architecture and urban planning with a love of history and heritage, she enjoyed the diversity of teaching in the Growth and Structure of Cities Program at Bryn Mawr. Collaborating with faculty in many different disciplines, she acquired broad experience in administration, research and education.

But investigation and design of the built environment remained limited in the context of liberal arts education, and Hein was eager to come back to architecture and design and to teach at the master’s and PhD level. Educated in architecture faculties, she saw herself as belonging to the architects as an architectural historian. That meant connecting the lessons of the past to the present and to the design of the future. She was interested in bringing the spatial component to the natural and technical sciences, the social sciences and the humanities. The position as Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning at TU Delft offered a unique opportunity to return to her disciplinary field of origin. This was not a completely new start, however. Most of the colleagues in the History Chair had worked at TU Delft for a long time and she had met many of them through her earlier research on European Architecture and Planning. Herman van Bergeijk and Cor Wagenaar shared her interest in European architectural and urban planning history. Research by other members of the Chair – Reinout Rutte on historic geospatial mapping, Everhard Korthals-Altes on the Dutch Golden Age and Charlotte van Wijk on the Chair collection – complemented her interests and offered the potential for shared research on connecting past, present and future through the lens of the built environment.

Over the next ten years, the group evolved and colleagues arrived and departed. Rachel Lee brings an interest in decolonization, Vincent Baptist on mapping and health, Aart Oxenaar on Dutch architectural history, Yvonne van Mil on geospatial historical mapping, while John Hanna contributes as tutor and researcher to strengthen the link between history and design. Paolo De Martino serves as tutor to multiple courses. Many other researchers, postdocs and PhDs have evolved in collaboration with members of the Chair, developing new research and education lines.

In a technical university, history is not a key discipline, which means that there is not much attention given to the teaching of this subject. The Chair has expanded the field of history as it has encouraged collaboration across departments, faculties and universities. Notable collaborations have taken place with colleagues from the Leiden, Delft, Erasmus (LDE) universities on heritage and port cities. As part of this university consortium, the History Chair has connected with other universities and Hein has the honor of serving as a professor at Leiden University and Erasmus University and as UNESCO Chair Water, Ports and Historic Cities.

The desire to combine historical analysis with future planning is especially evident in the Chair’s role in the PortCityFutures Center, which focuses on how relationships between port and city have changed over time, from the local to the regional scale. The goal is to understand the implications of these historic relations for future developments. The group also collaborates with other institutions to spearhead research on adaptive strategies for water heritage and most recently developed a new open access peer-reviewed publication, Blue Papers.

The output of the Chair includes academic and professional publications—books and journals—as well as exhibitions, debates and conferences, online open courses such as (Re)Imagining Port Cities and Water Works, and serious games such as Water Values. Members of the Chair develop and apply digital tools, including augmented reality platforms and apps for the automated recognition of architectural and urban forms. Through a focus on port city territories, water systems, mapping, and the relation between history, heritage, past, present and future, explorations of colonial and postcolonial conditions, of multiple scales from chairs to territory, we have managed to put the Chair History of Architecture and Urban Planning and all the members of the group at the forefront of historical investigation of the built environment.