Session 2

From 1931 through 1939 Ernst Herzfeld and Erich Schmidt directed the Oriental Institute’s Persian Expedition in Iran. During their exploration, excavation, and restoration of this ancient site of the Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 BC), Herzfeld and Schmidt had photographers Hans-Wichart von Busse and Boris Dubensky document the architectural wonders and landscape of Persepolis. This rich collection of photographs is now housed in the Museum Archives of the Oriental Institute.

Under what conditions do the everyday activities associated with being a good person provide a source of happiness and meaning in human life? What is the difference between morally serious people whose lives give them deep happiness and a sense of purpose, and morally serious people whose lives feel hollow?

More than any other science in antiquity, Western astronomy was rooted in objects, categories, and techniques original to Mesopotamia. The Babylonian zodiac circle, in turn, grew out of more than five centuries of attempts at mapping the sky. This talk uses illustrations of ancient ‘astrolabes’ and constellation and planet drawings, along with computer simulations of the sky, to explore how ancient thinkers employed creative methods to relate celestial time and space, lunar and solar calendars, and observation and theory.

A discussion of the opera Afterword, created at the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and premiering at MCA Chicago on October 16–17. Afterword is a “Bildungsoper”—a coming-of-age opera of ideas and testament whose libretto is drawn from A Power Stronger Than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music (University of Chicago Press), George Lewis's 2008 book on the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, a Chicago-born, internationally acclaimed African American experimental music collective.

Spanning a century of momentous and rapid political, social, and economic change, Expressionist Impulses charts the ebb and flow of key Expressionist tendencies in German and Central European art from, among other countries, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Romania. The incisive, often emotionally charged paintings, drawings, and sculptures on view—mounted from the Smart’s collection and supplemented by select promised gifts—bear powerful witness to periods of war, utopian dreams, economic depression, political division, and personal and political exile.

What matters about architecture, as an immersive and usable art, is not only how buildings are designed by architects but also how people perform or carry out activities in and around them, and the extent to which architecture itself performs or produces meaningful effects on users. This panel analyzes how people participate in an extended performative dialogue with architecture, in three examples from late medieval Italy, twelfth-century China, and nineteenth-century France.