2026-27 R. K. Teetzel Lecture in Architecture

Auctioning Architecture: Houses Becoming Art

Presented by Mari Lending

Hybrid Lecture
Tuesday, September 29, 4:30-6:00 p.m. ET
In person and online (followed by a reception)
Paul Cadario Conference Centre at Croft Chapter House 
University College, 15 King’s College Circle, Toronto, ON M5S 3H7

*This event is free, and all are welcome, though registration is required and seating is limited for in-person attendance.

Since the eighteenth century, auction houses have sold estates, houses, entire rooms, façades, and architectural elements cut out of existing or demolished buildings as well as fixtures and site-specific furniture designed by architects. Auctions circulate architecture as lots in the salesroom, as cargo en route but also, and in surprising ways, move buildings into storage and redeem them from odd states of stasis as items awaiting their next destination. Auctioned architecture may be lost and found; destroyed, dismembered, repurposed, restyled. Across 300 years, auctions have transformed spectacular buildings to commonplace commodities and have the power to advance also modular structures and serialized productions as singular sensations. The trope of architecture as art has been cultivated in rostrum oratory since the Rockefeller Guest House was hammered down at Sotheby’s in 1989. This lecture contemplates how modernist houses sold in auction are subjected to intricate processes of commodification and singularization.

To attend this lecture virtually, please click the link below. Please submit a registration for each person who plans to attend. You must register to access the webinar link.

To attend this lecture in person, please click the link below. Please submit a registration for each person who plans to attend.

About the Speaker

Mari Lending is a professor of architectural history and theory at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, a founding member of OCCAS (the Oslo Centre of Critical Architectural studies), and the director of the international research project Provenance Projected: Architecture Past and Future in the Era of Circularity (2023–2027). Before she doctorated in architectural historiography, she studied intellectual history and did her first dissertation in comparative literature at the University of Oslo. She has been a visiting fellow at Harvard University, Columbia University, Yale University and the Warburg Institute. Among her books are Plaster Monuments. Architecture and the Power of Reproduction (Princeton University Press, 2017) and Sverre Fehn, Nordic Pavilion, Venice. Voices from the Archives, with Erik Langdalen (Lars Müller, 2020). She is the editor, with Uwe Fleckner, of Provenance in Architecture. A Dictionary (Hatje Cantz, 2025). She is presently working on the monograph Auctioning Architecture.

The Teetzel Lectureship was established under the terms of the will of Mrs. Rita K. Teetzel, who graduated from University College in 1912. In her will, Mrs. Teetzel requested that a portion of her estate be used "for the furtherance of studies in Architecture for women in University College." This Lectureship aims to bring to the College and to the University of Toronto distinguished lecturers in art and architecture.