AHRA Newsletter:
January-February 2012
This is the latest issue of the newsletter highlighting forthcoming events, conferences, publications and other research activities.
If you would like to receive this information by e-mail, and you haven't yet signed up as a member of AHRA, please follow the link to the AHRA website for details of how to register on the database. Membership is currently free and is open to all humanities researchers working in Schools of Architecture and related disciplines both in the UK and overseas. Please also encourage colleagues to register here: http://www.ahra-architecture.org/registration/
If you are planning a research event that you would like to promote through the newsletter, please log in to the AHRA website and post the details by clicking on the 'Post Your Event' link under the 'Events' menu. These details will appear on the 'Future Events' page within a few days (subject to moderation) and will also be included in the next issue of the Newsletter. If you have not logged in to the site before, you should enter your default username ('firstnamelastname') and click on the 'forgotten your password' link for further instructions.
To promote other items of interest (new books, courses, other research resources etc) please send details by email to Stephen Walker at:
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The next newsletter will be issued in early March 2012.
New Events
Event web site
Harmonious inter-relationship between built and natural context at both neighborhood and city scale
International Society of Biourbanism
August 30 2013
Call for Papers:
The new Journal of Bio Urbanism (JBU), a peer-reviewed international online journal of architecture, planning, and built environment studies, is currently considering papers for inclusion in its first issue launching in 2011.
The JBU aims at establishing a bridge between new theories and practice in the fields of design, architectural and urban planning, and built environment studies.
We invite papers which examine the latest research on biophilic approach, and focuses on harmonious inter-relationship between built and natural context at both neighborhood and city scale.
Please send your submissions to the editor (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)), by 30 August 2011.
Participants will be notified by November 2011.
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Fri 30 August 2013
Event web site
The 9th International Architectural Humanities Research Association International Conference
London Metropolitan University
November 15 2012 - November 17 2012
This conference aims to reflect on the relevance of the concept of dissidence for architectural practice today. Although dissidence has been primarily associated with architectural practices in the Eastern Bloc at the end of the Cold War period, contemporary architectural and other aesthetic practices have in recent years developed a host of new methodologies and techniques for articulating their distance from and critique of dominant political and financial structures. Architecture and the Paradox of Dissidence asks how we can conceive of the contemporary political problems and paradoxes of architecture in relation to their precedents? Devoid of the agency of action, Cold War dissidents articulated their positions in drawings of fantasy-like paper architecture, while contemporary forms of architectural practice seem to gravitate towards activism and direct-action in the world. The political issues – from interventions in charged areas worldwide to research in conflict zones and areas undergoing transformations – currently stimulate a field of abundant invention in contemporary architecture. Both, Cold War dissidents and contemporary activists encounter problems and paradoxes and must navigate complex political force fields within which possible complicities are inherent risks.
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Thu 15 November 2012
Event web site
Cologne, Germany
August 26 2012 - August 30 2012
Call for Papers
Double Conference Session: 'The Uses of Art in Public Space'
Chairs: Julia Lossau & Quentin Stevens
International Geographical Congress
(on website: see Calls - Commissions and Task Forces - Stream C08.07 Cultural Approach in Geography)
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Sun 26 August 2012
Event web site
The 2012 A.W.N. Pugin bicentennial conference
University of Kent, Canterbury
July 13 2012 - July 14 2012
This conference will be the primary international academic event marking the bicentenary of the birth of the architect A.W.N. Pugin, bringing the field’s leading scholars worldwide to a broad-based conference in Canterbury. It will also be the first conference on the British Gothic Revival's international impact that incorporates North America, and the first significant international conference on the subject since ‘Gothic Revival: religion, architecture and style in Western Europe’ (Leuven, 1997).
There will be opportunities to visit key Pugin sites immediately before and after the conference. In association with the Pugin Society, The Victorian Society and the Landmark Trust we will offer visits to the Grange and St Augustine’s in Ramsgate. Further tours and walks will be organised over the following week to Gothic Revival sites in Birmingham and Staffordshire.
The academic sessions of the conference will be held on 13-14 July 2012 at the University of Kent in Canterbury.
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Fri 13 July 2012
Event web site
2 0 1 2 I S P A C o n f e r e n c e
Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
July 11 2012 - July 13 2012
Call for papers
Deadlines:
Abstracts: 28 October 2011
Notification of Acceptance: 06 January 2012
Full Papers: 30 March 2012
Early Registration: 30 April 2012
The subject of aesthetics is often taken as dealing with questions of mere beauty, where the word 'aesthetic' is colloquially interchangeable with beauty and liking. Someone might, for instance, explain their liking the look of a particular object on the basis of its 'aesthetics'. Interestingly, even within the specialised architecture discourse, the aesthetic is largely discussed on the basis of an object's appearance. Yet, the aesthetic is not limited and should not be limited merely to the way things look. Any philosophically informed aesthetician, will contest this limited view, saying something along the lines of 'the aesthetic is everything'. The aim of this conference is therefore in part to address this discursive limitation in architecture and related subjects by broadening the aesthetic discourse beyond questions relating to purely visual phenomena in order to include those derived from all facets of human experience.
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Wed 11 July 2012
Event web site
29th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians Australia and New Zealand
University of Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania
July 05 2012
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Thu 5 July 2012
Event web site
Second International Meeting
Brussels, Belgium
May 31 2012 - June 03 2012
Call for Session and Roundtable Proposals Deadline: 19 December 2010
The European Architectural History Network (EAHN) is organizing its second international meeting in Brussels in spring 2012 with twenty-three panels and four roundtables treating topics from antiquity through medieval and early modern to the present. Panels include topics in the history of architecture, urbanism, gardens and landscape, as well as in architectural theory and historiography.
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Thu 31 May 2012
Event web site
EMERGING BOUNDARIES OF RESEARCH PRINCIPLES & PRAXIS
Scott Sutherland School of Architecture, Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen
May 19 2012 - May 20 2012
The 9th AHRA PhD student Conference is expected to give delegates a platform to share and explore emerging approaches to research methods, urban issues and findings, and overall to provide a conduit for student delegates to establish collaborations and stir polemical debates in order to allow them to recflect on their position regarding cities and architecture.
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Sat 19 May 2012
Copenhagen
April 12 2012 - April 15 2012
All members and sympathizers of ARC●PEACE are welcome to the 17th General Assembly meeting of our organisation in Copenhagen. This event marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of ARC●PEACE. At the meeting you will learn to know new members, enjoy seminar presentations, exchange experiences, discuss current professional issues, and take wise decisi- ons about the future of our organisation.
The ARC●PEACE meeting is connected to the General Assembly (GA) meeting of Architecture Sans Frontières–International (ASF-Int, of which ARC●PEACE is a member).
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Thu 12 April 2012
Event web site
International Urban Design Conference
University of Nottingham
April 05 2012 - April 06 2012
Abstracts due 30th September 2011
Keynote Speakers:
Amanda Reynolds, Chair of the Urban Design Group
Ali Madanipour, Professor of Urban Design, Newcastle University
Themes:
• Theoretical definitions and the conceptual components of place
• Methodological studies that suggest a form of analysis or pedagogy
• Case studies that examine the specificities of place
Contributions will be organised in thematic sessions. Selected texts will be published in an accompanying book.
CALL FOR PAPERS
Over the past twenty years, place has emerged as the key concept for urban design. The concept of place is loosely defined as the interrelationship between the formal and spatial organisation of buildings, groups of buildings, streets, spaces and landscapes; the activities taking place within it and the meaning associated with it. The agency assigned to each of these components of place varies according to different traditions of thought and design theory. By definition, the triad of space, activity and meaning cannot be captured in a fixed theoretical framework.
contd...
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Thu 5 April 2012
Event web site
University of Lincoln, UK
April 05 2012 - April 06 2012
An International Conference to be held at the University of Lincoln, UK
Organised by the East Midlands History and Philosophy Research Network
http://www.theoreticalcurrents.com
Call for Papers
In Ptolemy’s Cosmographia, the geographic impulse maps not only the known world, but also the inhabited world – the world of cities, towns and architecture. The cartographic drive to realise the phenomenal experience of place, territory, nation, in tangible and visible analogues such as maps, and less tangible ideas in the representations of dominion, cultivation, and culture is still with us today.
Our present age of globalisation has witnessed a growing interest in the potential affinities between the theories and methodologies of geography and architecture. Manifested in the intersecting relationships between notions of region, geophysical terrain, landscape, topography and architectural space, this development has contributed to an emerging field of enquiry. We see this for example in the deployment of geographical techniques and terminologies in architectural and urban design, and the appropriation (or transformation) of traditional architectural concepts (such as scale and proportion) to a matrix of spatio-temporal relationships.
This conference proposes to assemble a group of thinkers who examine this topic from both a contemporary and historical perspective, highlighting how developments in surveying, cartography, geology, perspective, agriculture, trade, politics, transport and warfare have contributed in varying ways to the perception and representation of architecture as a geographical concern.
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Thu 5 April 2012
Event web site
Chichen Itza, Mexico
April 03 2012 - April 07 2012
ACS 4 proposes to go to the very foundation from which all work on architecture and spirituality spring: the actual experience of an environment infused with such numinous, cultural, and place power that it holds the potential to catapult us into a ineffable, sublime state. In order to do so, ACS 4 asks participants to voluntarily take off their cultural, religious, language, ecological, ethnic, temporal, and architectural frameworks of operation in order to engage anew in the ancient act of pilgrimage. The destination is CHICHEN ITZA (in the Yucatan peninsula, MEXICO), the urban/architectural treasure of the Mayan civilization.
Because of its pilgrimage nature, ACS 4 deploys a very different type of scholarly and professional structure and procedure. Based on the sound principles of rhethoric, reflection-in-action, and action research, ACS 4 asks participants to propose and then direct or deliver on-site discussion-papers, research projects, workshops/exercises, and/or performances/shows on topics germane to the spirit of this enterprise and their own expertise. ACS 4 will organize these proposals within three Salons affording both collective and individual experiences. Given the nature of theACS 4 experience, we will limit symposium registration to the 20-24 individuals whose works have been accepted for inclusion in the program. Others interested in attending the meeting, while welcome to attend the Salons at no cost, will have to make their own travel arrangements.
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Tue 3 April 2012
Event web site
Reinventing Architecture and Interiors: the past, the present and the future
Ravensbourne. London. UK
March 29 2012 - March 30 2012
An International Conference on the re-use and re-design of buildings in contemporary settings
Thursday 29th and Friday 30th March 2012
Ravensbourne, London.
Deadline for abstracts: 01 Novemebr 2011
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Thu 29 March 2012
Event web site
ideas competition
March 16 2012
Pruitt Igoe Now is an ideas competition launched by a non-profit organization of the same name. The subject is the 57-acre site of the long-mythologized Pruitt and Igoe housing projects in St. Louis, Missouri, USA -- a site whose future is intertwined with emerging ideas about urban abandonment, the legacy of modernism, brownfield redevelopment and land use strategies for shrinking cities. This competition seeks the ideas of the creative community worldwide: we invite individuals and teams of professional, academic, and student architects, landscape architects, urban planners, designers, writers, historians, and artists of every discipline to re-imagine the site and the relationship between those acres to the rest of the city.
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Fri 16 March 2012
Event web site
First Alvar Aalto Research Conference
Seinäjoki and Jyväskylä, Finland
March 12 2012 - March 14 2012
The seminar will be a multidisciplinary academic meeting, at which architects, researchers, historians and others interested in the subject will be invited to present their own academic contributions to the discourse on Aalto.
The Conference will be held in Seinäjoki Town Hall (designed by Alvar Aalto) on March 12 and 13, 2012, and on March 14 there will be an excursion to Alajärvi (town centre designed by Alvar Aalto) and Jyväskylä, where it will be possible to explore the contents of the Aalto archives, and visit the storage areas, and also to meet museum and archive personnel.
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Mon 12 March 2012
Event web site
Call for Papers
Taylor&Francis publication
March 05 2012 - September 03 2012
Digital Creativity is a major peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of the creative arts and digital technologies. It publishes articles of interest to those involved in the practical task and theoretical aspects of making or using digital media in creative contexts. By the term 'creative arts' we include such disciplines as fine art, graphic design, illustration, photography, printmaking, sculpture, 3D design, interaction design, product design, textile and fashion design, film making, animation, games design, music, dance, drama, creative writing, poetry, interior design, architecture, and urban design. This special issue of the journal invites papers, projects and reviews exploring and developing the notion of Design Fictions. One of the early proponents of Design Fictions, the author Bruce Sterling, said that design: “seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls – scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design” (Sterling, 2009). Despite the current burgeoning of this field and its various histories and antecedents, the coming together of design and fiction, as ‘design fictions’, remains relatively underexplored.
Digital Creativity is a major peer-reviewed journal at the intersection of the creative arts and digital technologies. It publishes articles of interest to those involved in the practical task and theoretical aspects of making or using digital media in creative contexts. By the term 'creative arts' we include such disciplines as fine art, graphic design, illustration, photography, printmaking, sculpture, 3D design, interaction design, product design, textile and fashion design, film making, animation, games design, music, dance, drama, creative writing, poetry, interior design, architecture, and urban design.
This special issue of the journal invites papers, projects and reviews exploring and developing the notion of Design Fictions. One of the early proponents of Design Fictions, the author Bruce Sterling, said that design: “seeks out ways to jump over its own conceptual walls – scenarios, user observation, brainstorming, rapid prototyping, critical design, speculative design” (Sterling, 2009). Despite the current burgeoning of this field and its various histories and antecedents, the coming together of design and fiction, as ‘design fictions’, remains relatively underexplored.
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Mon 5 March 2012
February 04 2012 - February 28 2012
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Sat 4 February 2012
Event web site
TOURbanISM-toURBANISM
Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona
January 25 2012 - January 27 2012
To strengthen the international collaboration in Urbanism, the International Forum on Urbanism develops international conferences to contribute to the international debate on Urbanism and to stimulate the exchange between academic and professional institutions. The sixth, entitled TOURbanISM-toURBANISM, will take place from January 25th to 27th, 2012, at the Catalonian Politechnic University (UPC) in Barcelona.
The conference aims to generate an exchange between the academic and the professional debate, to investigate opportunities and risks for the sustainable touristical development and to discuss visions, concepts and best practices. In this framework causes, reasons and dependencies of worldwide transformation processes will be analyzed and planning strategies and design concepts for a more sustainable development of tourism will be explored.
Deadline for abstracts submission JUNE 17th, 2011
ANNEX: List of current member institutions of IFoU:
TU Delft / Berlage Institute Rotterdam / IUA Venetia / UPC Barcelona / Tsinghua University Beijing / Beijing University of Technology / Taiwan University Taipei / National University of Singapore / Tarumanagara University Jakarta / Chinese University of HongKong / Tongjii University Shangai / University of Tokio / Seoul National University / Chonnam National University of Korea / National Cheng Kung University of Taiwan
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Wed 25 January 2012
Event web site
Edinburgh Architecture Research Journal, The University of Edinburgh, UK
January 16 2012
The 33rd edition of EAR Journal at the University of Edinburgh invites researchers and practitioners to submit papers on 'Methodologies of Sustainable Projects'. This multi-disciplinary edition will be published in August 2012 and the deadline for abstract submission is due 16 January 2012. Shortlisted authors will be notified by 15 February 2012. For more information please visit our website:
http://sites.ace.ed.ac.uk/ear/call-for-papers/
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Mon 16 January 2012
Event web site
Crowdfunding appeal: 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR)
January 01 2012 - December 31 2012
To ensure that our cities can convey us to a sustainable future, we must design, plan and govern them better. That is the message of the 5th International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR): Making City. It is in this context that architecture firm ZUS is tackling Rotterdam’s Central District. This is the area between the Central Station, Weena and Pompenburg. Under the motto ‘I Make Rotterdam’, ZUS is calling on all Rotterdammers to contribute to the development of their city.
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Sun 1 January 2012
January 01 2012
NORDIC Journal of Architecture is an international, academic journal on architecture and design; so far the most ambitious initiative of its kind. In recent years, Nordic architecture has become a topical issue internationally, and several research projects studying Scandinavian topics are being conducted in the US and Europe. NORDIC Journal of Architecture is part of this new momentum, negotiating the territory between architectural practice, its historical presuppositions, and its theoretical repercussions.
NORDIC is a forum for architectural scholarship, but also for investigating the relationship between architectural culture and society at large. Using specific events, conferences or debates as points of departure, each issue will present contemporary architectural research and practice, including design, historiography, teaching, and criticism. Encompassing works as well as criticism, and speculation as well as meticulous scholarship, it engages with the full complexity of contemporary architectural culture.
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Sun 1 January 2012
Event web site
Submission deadline 28 February 2012
December 28 2011
In the light of massive catastrophes – the earthquakes near Sendai and Christchurch, the tsunamis of Acheh and Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans – the question of urban and architectural reconstruction invokes the question of remembering. What is this ‘past’ that we remember and on which we base our future reconstructions? What images of the past do we call upon in our decisions to build or not to build – and how do they negotiate the terrain between memory and history, nature and culture, technology and sustainability, planning and responding, tradition and innovation, foundations and interstices?
To Bernard Stiegler, the image that we recall in/as history is not an “image in general”. Rather it is an image with an irreducible materiality, inscribed in a technical history. That is to say, the image-object of history is given to us; we inherit it and make it our own. History has therefore a technicity and its own historicity: the architecture of its images contains technical traces of their construction.
The task of the historian becomes more complex in the light of such mnemotechnics. In recalling the past, no transcendental signified or image precedes the image-object. The event of memory calls for an imagination that does not separate mental images from image-objects and their associated technics of construction and dissemination.
As Lebbeus Woods says, the inventions and radical reconstructions that make survival possible under extreme, catastrophic conditions provide new ways of living in a paradoxical state of perpetual destruction and construction. Here, the image-object of the past maintains a dynamics of simultaneous political, technological, epistemological and personal change. The practices of architecture, design and art – when treated as images with technicities that produce an artificial already-there of the past that is not lived but imposed – become useful strata to identify and render problematic civic values and democratic processes.
What are some of the key image-objects that architecturalise historiography, particularly the historiographies of architecture, design and art? What are the ontological conditions surrounding these historical image-objects, their construction and dissemination? What alternative topologies of memorialising the past are imaginable: narratival, conversational, oral and gestural? What images are inherited by the historian, and how does the interior (psychic) condition of the historian assimilate (or not) the otherness of the image-objects that arrive from the outside?
Taking seriously the metaphor of the cinematic, the temporalisation of the image-object and its absorption into the sphere of production, and the indeterminacy of images that carry the technics of interhuman relations, this issue of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts [1] invokes the theatre of the historian’s individuation alongside history’s mnemotechnics that organize the images which appear whenever memory is invoked.
We invite you to contribute to the forthcoming issue – either in the refereed or non-refereed part. Interstices accepts both academic and practice oriented, fully written as well as visual, contributions for double blind refereeing and welcomes articles related to the issue theme. For the refereed part, we welcome submission of 5000 word papers and visual submissions with an accompanying text of approximately 500 words. For the non-refereed part, we welcome papers up to 2500 words and project reports and reviews of up to 1000 words. Please visit our website and check out the Notes for Contributors for details about the reviewing process, copyright issues and formatting: http://interstices.ac.nz/.
Please send your submission to Andrew Douglas (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)) by 28 February 2012. Authors accepted for the reviewing process will receive confirmation and a schedule in early March and the journal will go to publication in November 2012.
We look forward to your contribution!
[1] Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts received an “A” rating in the 2009 and 2010 Australian Research Council’s Journal Ranking Exercise. See also http://www.2020publication.info/
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Wed 28 December 2011
Event web site
Worldmaking as Techné:
Exploring Worlds of Participatory Art, Architecture, and Music
December 15 2011
The editors of this book project were drawn together by a common outlook that the creation of work is the creation of concepts, joining the efforts of theory and praxis in one process (techné), and that the results of our works are the expression of an ontological proposition (worldmaking). This connection was the catalyst to host the panel discussion, The Volatility and Stability of Worldmaking as Techné, at the Inter-Society of Electronic Arts conference 2011 (ISEA 2011). Along with invited panelists, Roy Ascott, Jerome Decock, and Marcos Novak, the panel presented a wide range of perspectives on the topic that covered theory and practice in the areas of art, architecture, and music. While well received the discussion was all too short and only scratched the surface. Thus the inspiration to launch this book project comes from a desire to further explore WorldMaking as Techné in participatory works.
The book, Worldmaking as Techné: Exploring Worlds of Participatory Art, Architecture, and Music will focus on the involvement of the techné of worldmaking in participatory art practice. Such practice can be found in all areas of art, however, under scrutiny for this particular book are: interactive, generative, and prosthetic art, architecture, and music practices that depend for their vitality and development on the participation of their observers. The book editors are seeking contributions that will challenge the level of involvement and integration of the observer within the generative praxis in a technoscientific agenda. In this spirit,contributions that cover philosophical, theoretical, and practice-based research are all welcome.
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Thu 15 December 2011
Event web site
33 Edition, Edinburgh Architecture Research Journal
The University of Edinburgh, UK
December 12 2011 - January 16 2012
The 33rd edition of EAR Journal at the University of Edinburgh invites researchers to submit papers on 'Methodologies of Sustainable Projects'. This multi-disciplinary edition will be published in August 2012 and the deadline for abstract submission is due 16 January 2012. Shortlisted authors will be notified by 15 February 2012. For more information please visit EAR website:http://sites.ace.ed.ac.uk/ear/call-for-papers/
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Mon 12 December 2011
New Publications
Digimag is the electronic arts and digital culture monthly magazine, published by Digicult.
All Issues of Digimag are included in this archive, from its first Issue of February 2005 to its latest monthly Issue.
DIGICULT is an Italian platform created to spread digital art and culture worldwide. It focuses on the impact of new technologies and modern sciences on art design culture and contemporary society. DIGICULT is the editor of the magazine DIGIMAG which focuses on cultural and artistic issues e.g. art & science software art design etc. Please visit http://www.digicult.it <http://www.digicult.it> & http://www.digicult.it/digimag <http://www.digicult.it/digimag> for more information
The following titles by Dr Eugenia Fratzeskou are included in the Digimag archive. These are critical essays, conference reports and interviews, with a particular focus on spatial practices and research at the intersection of art, technology and science:
Art and architecture: investigation at the boundaries of space - Digimag 52
Chora platonica and digital matrix - Digimag 55
Isea 2010 ruhr. unfolding space - Digimag 57
Interruptive site-specificity in contemporary digital art - Digimag 59
"tracing" infra-spaces: complicated beginnings & elliptical ends - Digimag 60
"tracing" infra-spaces. complicated beginnings & elliptical ends - Digimag 61
Urban transcripts 2010. over the skin of the city - Digimag 62
Revealing interstitial spaces. part 1 - Digimag 63
Revealing interstitial spaces. part 2 - Digimag 64
Revealing interstitial spaces. part 3 - Digimag 65
Operative transformations. part 1 - Digimag 66
Operative transformations. part 2 - Digimag 67
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Mon 9 January 2012
