Book Presentation with Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber and Jeff Derksen

Together with Jeff Derksen, the artists Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber present their third volume of their series Educational Modernism. Encounter EDUCATIONAL MODERNISM focuses on the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, built by Canadian architect Arthur Erickson in the early 1970s during the New Universities movements and a global moment of the expansion of universities. 

Using the concept of the educational, multicultural, and urban encounter, this artistic research project includes photographs and an introduction from the artists and critical contributions from architectural historian Victoria Baster and writer Jeff Derksen. 

With this iconic university Erickson challenged the spatial programs of the academy, knowledge production, the concept of students, and the university’s relationship to the landscape.  As an interdisciplinary university in one building, including student housing, the campus stages spaces of encounter to activate the concept of the student as an active global citizen This late-sixties humanist imagination of the student shapes the university’s spatial program and clashes with the current neoliberal view of the student as entrepreneur. 

The series Educational Modernism is published by adocs Hamburg in cooperation with Edition Camera Austria, Graz and will be continued with a focus on The Workers University Zagreb by Yugoslavian architects Radovan Nikšić and Ninoslav Kučan.

WATCH: PUBLIC SEMINAR: Video by Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber.

Access to Secession is via the side entrance on the back side of the building.