History of Art and Architecture

"Implements of Impression" Lecture Series

Welcome to "Implements of Impression", the 2025-26 HIAA Themed Lecture Series

Featured Speakers:

October 21, 2025, 6 pm: Michael Falser, Architectural Historian at Heidelberg University, Germany

February 26, 2026: Iris Moon, Associate Curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC

Spring 2026: Amanda Reeser Lawrence, Professor, Northeastern University, Boston

Spring 2026: Yung-ti Lee, Associate Professor, University of Chicago

 

Whether it is a matrix pressed into clay or a framework filled with concrete, implements of impression are the tools and techniques that artists and architects use to make works of art and architecture in multiple. Blocks and molds, print and cast, tracing and rubbing, line and void; rarely are these implements and their impressions singular. 

For preservationists, these tools—molds, casts, architectural modules, woodblocks, engraved plates, photographic negatives, silkscreens—are among the most tangible traces of intangible heritage. For scholars of early modern, modern, and contemporary art and architecture, they are the tools of the printmaking or architecture studio and the fine arts foundry. For those invested in the study of the deeper past, these techniques of making are most often absent. They can be reverse engineered from the fragments of excavated workshops and the impressions they left on surviving works of art and architecture.

 

This lecture series is made possible through the generous support of:

The Marshall Woods Lectureship Foundation of Fine Arts and The Anita Glass Fund

photo of Anchor Wat temple at night

October 21, 6 pm: Michael Falser

Between World’s Fairs, (Post)Colonial Archaeologies and UNESCO World Heritage: Angkor Wat’s Transcultural Circles of Impression

The 12-century temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia is without a doubt one of the world’s most impressive religious stone monuments and a milestone in the architectural history of Southeast Asia. And while the temple became the centerpiece of the UNESCO World Heritage site of Archaeological Park of Angkor in 1992 and is today threatened by global mass tourism, the temple’s modern history as a global heritage icon is a methodological challenge. Falser will take us on a global journey, with insights from his monograph Angkor Wat: A Transcultural History of Heritage (DeGruyter, Berlin 2020) which mapped out the multiple lives of Angkor Wat from the 1860s to the 2010s and presented a kind of visual anthology of the temple. The concept of “impression” will be discussed along visual, technical, physical and aesthetic perspectives. 

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Falser headshot in front of brick wall and cover to his book Angkor Wat

About Michael Falser

Michael Falser studied architecture and art history at the universities of Vienna, Paris and Berlin. Besides his activities as historic preservation architect and World heritage consultant for UNESCO and ICOMOS International, his long-standing research and teaching focus is in the combined field of global architectural history and cultural heritage studies. 

Between 2009 and 2017 he worked in the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context: The Dynamics of Transculturality” at Heidelberg University in Germany. Along with visiting professorships at the universities of Vienna, Kyoto, Bordeaux, Paris-Sorbonne, Heidelberg and lately Ottawa, he conducted, between 2020 and 2024 a German Research Foundation-funded research project at the Institute of Architectural History at Technical University of Munich, investigating German-colonial architecture as a global project around 1900 and as a transcultural heritage today. While he is still teaching at the Institute of Art History at Heidelberg University, he is, since 2025, head of the Research Institute of the Technisches Museum Wien (Vienna Museum of Science and Technology, Vienna/Austria).