Old and new organizational officers at the EAHN Plenary Session which opened the conference in Guimarães Thursday noon.
Photograph: EAHN 2010 / Carlos Moreira

The large audience for the Friday evening conference keynote event, “Denise Scott Brown talks with Gülsüm Baydar”; the speakers await their introductions in the right foreground.
Photograph: EAHN 2010 / Carlos Moreira

The founding members of the EAHN Committee toasting the successful completion of the organization’s first major independent conference in front of the Palace of the Dukes of Bragança, Guimarães, on Saturday evening.
Photograph: EAHN 2010

Denise Scott Brown with Jorge Correia and the conference’s student assistants from the Universidade do Minho.
Photograph: EAHN 2010 / Carlos Moreira

Guimarães Conference Wrap-Up

With over 250 registered participants, and even more people attending the three evening keynote events which were open to the general public, the EAHN First International Meeting in Guimarães from 17-20 June was a resounding success.  Denise Scott Brown’s keynote discussion with Gülsüm Baydar on Friday evening drew the biggest crowd, approximately 475 people, of which several dozen returned the next day for an impromptu picnic lunch with Scott Brown on the conference center lawn. From the perfect weather through the ideal scale of the Vila Flor Cultural Centre facilities and the charm of Guimarães itself, a congenial atmosphere pervaded the entire conference.

General chair Jorge Correia, with assistant Ana Lopes (Universidade do Minho) and their friendly and efficient team, presented impressively scheduled and organized sequences of scholarly and social events, which allowed conference participants to concentrate on the opportunities to debate, discuss, engage, and enjoy during four days of paper presentations, roundtable sessions, local and regional tours, keynote events, and evening dinners together.

Antoine Picon’s closing keynote address, which summarized five thematic threads winding thorough the paper and roundtable sessions, provided a brilliant and stimulating overview of the conference as a whole, and also proposed a future agenda for the entire discipline.  Professor Picon generously consented to share his keynote address with the EAHN in published form, and it is available as a special supplement to this issue of the EAHN Newsletter.  The supplement is designed as an A5 booklet, and may be downloaded as a PDF in two formats: booklet or single sheets.

In other conference developments, the EAHN Committee welcomed its new officers Adrian Forty, Mari Hvattum, Maarten Delbeke, and Tom Avermaete at a brief committee meeting Thursday morning before the new team officially took over at the closing ceremony Saturday evening.  The EAHN met its modest financial goal for the conference—to cover its costs—and a small surplus will be transferred to the treasury once all accounts are settled.

Conference tours were also well attended, with about sixty people taking part in the lunch hour tours of Guimarães.  On Sunday, fifty people visited a small sample of Alvaro Siza Vieira’s work scattered along Portugal’s Atlantic coast, and twenty-three toured nearby Braga from its Roman origins through its rich medieval and early modern monuments up to its new soccer stadium built for the European Football Championship tournament in 2004.

Dozens of conference photos are available on the conference website; visit http://www.eahn2010.org/ and click on “Meeting Photos” in the navigation bar on the left to download photo files from each day of the conference.