Alexandra Midal, professor and independant curator (Geneva), has been invited by LUCA to give the opening lecture of the Festival, which will take place at the Luxembourg Centre for Architecture (LUCA).

Wednesday, 12 November 2025 at 18:00.
Talk in French.
Free entrance, upon registration.

The invention of design: an architectural tale
The history of Western design was written by accident. Born at the crossroads of modern architecture and technical thinking, it was not initially conceived as an autonomous discipline. This lecture looks back at these unexpected origins to understand how design was invented through influences from elsewhere – and how this heritage continues to shape the way we conceive objects, spaces and creation today.

Nikolaus Pevsner’s Pioneers of the Modern Movement (1936) and Siegfried Giedion’s Mechanisation Takes Command (1948) can be considered the two seminal texts in the history of design. Together, they establish the origins of a system of structural references for design, but curiously, Pevsner developed it to explain the origins of the Modern Architecture Movement and promote it in a delicate context, while Giedion set about establishing an​“archaeology of technology”.

Consequently, neither of these two projects aimed to construct a history of design. Yet it was indeed these two historians of modern architecture who inaugurated it. While this origin is debatable, and contested, it remains nonetheless fundamental: the birth of a historiography of design, conceived by architecture, came about by accident.

How, then, should we consider the discipline of design from this perspective, which questions its invention, its scope and its horizons, while offering a stimulating look at the narratives that have shaped it? What if, in the end, this happy coincidence allowed us to better understand the relationships and frictions between design and architecture?

This conference is organised by Design Luxembourg and LUCA as part of the Luxembourg Design Festival.

Alexandra Midal, Professor at HEAD – Genève, is an art and design historian, artist-curator, and former director of the Design Project Room and FRAC Haute-Normandie. She curated the Ljubljana Biennial (Do You Speak Flowers?) and will present her exhibition M for Magic at Mudac in Fall 2025. Upcoming books include Dancing Girls, Hypnotic Fascism, Subliminal at the Edge, and Design, transes, secte et féminisme.