CFP - CAA Conference
Matthew Heins
Beyond the Silk Road
Session will
present: In-Person
Di Luo, Connecticut College
Email Address(s): dl...@conncoll.edu
Scholars have often evoked the Silk Road as a readymade model to validate long-distance interactions in their attempt to present a cross-cultural history of architecture. In Alexander Soper's investigation of the Dome of Heaven in Asia, the Silk Road provided the necessary means to historicize the connections between the ceilings of Rome, India, and China. But Soper's approach has since received criticisms for the Eurocentric, perhaps Orientalist, view of the diffusion of architecture from the West to the East, and for ignoring unique cultural contexts that bestowed Asian domes with disparate purposes and meanings.
This session explores new approaches to the study of the global history of architecture. How might we investigate the transmission of architectural knowledge across long distances in the past, and how do we build toward an unbiased discourse of global history that reveals not unilateral "influences," but multi-lateral interactions between architectures of the world? How might alternative models and theories suggest new routes and patterns of human movement and communication not already mapped on the existing Silk Road?
This session welcomes papers that explore long-distance exchanges in architecture that challenge, supplement, revise, or subvert the Silk Road model, broadly defined. All cultures and periods are welcome. Papers may introduce new models or methods, reveal new materials, provide case studies, or present works in progress.
Buildings on the Move:
Architecture and Travel Across the Pre-Modern World
Session will
present: In-Person
Elisabeth Dawn Narkin and Kyle G. Sweeney, Winthrop University
Email Address(s): e-na...@nga.gov ,
swee...@winthrop.edu
Contemporary discussions of the impact of globalization and digital processes on the practice of architecture often overlook the fact that the transmission and adaptation of architectural concepts has a long history. Since the pre-modern age, the movement of people, materials, techniques, and ideas has informed architectural theory and practice. Architectural drawings, treatises, painted cityscapes, maps, travelogs, and other records suggest that the human and informational networks that undergirded this interchange were multi-directional and, ever-increasingly, geographically vast and that the implications for architecture were profound.
The mingling of indigenous knowledge and local materials in the colonial Americas is well-known, as is the diffusion and adaptation of Italian Renaissance forms across Europe. But recent scholarship and collaborative digital projects have begun to further unravel the complex modalities of pre-modern travel and its influence on architectural practices. This panel interrogates the role travel played in the circulation of people, architectural knowledge, materials, and techniques across the globe and examines the influences of travel and cultural exchange in the shaping of pre-modern spaces. This panel seeks papers focused on representations of the built environment, historical itinerancies, travel narratives, networks of architectural knowledge and publication, and the applications of geospatial technologies for architectural history. Questions to be explored include how styles and forms acted as agents of cultural identity, how architectural knowledge was transmitted across space and time, and what travelogs and related documentation might reveal about the pre-modern understanding of architecture that might otherwise be obscured.
Decolonizing Modern Design
Histories
Session will
present: Virtual
Affiliated
Society or Committee Name: Committee on Design
Grace Ong Yan, Thomas Jefferson
University and Yelena McLane, Florida State University
Email Address(s): grace....@jefferson.edu ,
ymc...@fsu.edu
First published in 2004, late professor and scholar David Raizman’s landmark interdisciplinary design history book, History of Modern Design, explored the dynamic relationship between design and manufacturing, and the technological, social, and commercial contexts in which this relationship developed. The book discussed many disciplines of design from typography to architecture, from seminal works to quotidian. Raizman contextualized design within “a framework that acknowledges a variety of perspectives through which it might be understood and appreciated, and that represent the dynamic interplay of multiple voices and forces within a given society and historical moment.” This inclusive approach is prescient today as we actively decolonize histories of modern design. Before his untimely passing, he was working on a third edition of this book. This session seeks papers that project and imagine the legacy of History of Modern Design and how race and gender shape diverse, equitable, and inclusive scholarship on modern design history. We are seeking papers that parse topics of modern design that build upon and depart from themes of History of Modern Design: 1) Art, Industry, and Utopias; 2) Modernism and Mass Culture after World War II; 2) Alternative Voices: Protest and Design.
In and Outside the Archive:
Evidencing Spatial Performance, Performing Spatial Evidence
Session will
present: In-Person
Affiliated
Society or Committee Name: Society of Architectural Historians
Sophie Read, University College
London and Ruth Elizabeth Bernatek, Oxford University
Email Address(s): sophi...@ucl.ac.uk ,
ruth.b...@music.ox.ac.uk
This panel seeks papers that examine historical performances, situated sonic practices or events, which were conceived, designed, executed and experienced as spatial works that unfolded in time. Tracing performative or audiovisual residues of past events poses challenges to those who study in the present ephemeral architectural objects/practices which were once ‘live’. E.g. whilst live sound, lighting, staging, voiced etc. elements can be performed at an architectural scale, knowledge about them is often not generated from spatial plans, but from written manuscripts, inventories, program-scores, or using tools that, in themselves, provide limited information about the spatial effects they produced. This compels alternative frameworks for historical interpretation that account for their performative and spatial situatedness.
We seek researchers who work at intersections between architecture, music, sound, performance and theatre, and their history, theory and design. We are interested in global and non-western approaches to performance, event, time and spatiality. Practice-led modes of spatial and historical research are welcome.
We are keen to engage with practical questions of retrieving and reconstructing spatial evidence. This might include how researchers approach the real-time qualities of performance and their own working methods, but also the physical building, landscape or space in which that event took place: how it unfolded over time, the occupation of space by performers and users/audience.
This prompts questions about the nature of archives; of their possibilities and limitations. What evidence exists for the different dimensions of a past spatial event? Is this different for different periods and their practices of architectural history?
Infrastructural Aesthetics
Session will
present: In-Person
Christopher M. Ketcham
Email Address(s): cket...@gmail.com
The highway system has long represented the boundless ambition of postwar American infrastructure: its claim on national identity, its reconfiguration of the landscape as a view from the road, and the freedom to go anywhere, anytime as long as one had a full tank of gas. Early highway discourse had been dominated by the pastoral ideal of a parkway built in harmony with the natural landscape. By the 1960s, however, this ideal was untenable, negated by the brutal realities of construction, particularly where the highway met the city, the explosive growth of automobile use, and the monotonous experience of driving. While the highway continued to expand rapidly, it become an object of theory, intersecting with discourses of space, perception, systems, and aesthetics. Artists also occupied new and old infrastructures of deindustrializing cities. Whether working alongside the highway, on the sinking piers of abandoned waterfronts, or in the conceptual spaces of cartography and telecommunications, artists have sought to reorient the subject within the socioeconomic networks that organize space, movement, thought, and power. In art today, inquiries related to scale, mobility, perception, and durational experience have given way to urgent questions of environment, equity, land rights, and social justice that cohere at the edge of the city and the margins of urban mobility. Conflicts of class, race, and gender inseparable from infrastructural development are brought into the realm of aesthetics and subject to critique and contestation. This panel seeks new approaches to assess infrastructural aesthetics from the 1960s to the present.
Monumentality in Art: Memory,
History, and Impermanence in Diaspora
Session will
present: In-Person
Patricia Eunji Kim, New York University and Marica Antonucci, John Hopkins University
Email Address(s): patric...@gmail.com ,
mant...@jhu.edu
At the heart of traditional notions of monumentality lies an appeal to permanence. Traditional monuments and commemorative art practices emphasize solidity, weight, visibility, and transhistorical stability through the selection of what and how to remember. Embodying particular social values and naturalizing specific historical narratives as truth, these objects and practices link the past and present by means of their enduring presence. In so doing, these works shape public space while symbolically reaffirming systems of power by aestheticizing the myth of permanence.
This panel seeks to understand how monument-makers broadly construed as artists, activists, and other cultural agents, specifically in diasporic communities, are re-imagining monuments and other commemorative actions. Taking an expansive view of diaspora, we welcome perspectives that address contexts of migration, political asylum, settler-colonialism, and other displacements. We ask how characteristics of diaspora, such as transnationality and impermanence, redress traditional approaches to memorialization that privilege ideas of longevity, durability, and endurance.
How have practitioners recalibrated traditional techniques of monument-making or repurposed existing structures to address diasporic memory? What new approaches in terms of scale, media, and viewer engagement have emerged to address questions posed by frameworks for theorizing diaspora? How do diasporic monuments affect conventional understandings of the relations between memory and monuments? Finally, how have transnational memory-workers confronted local, national, and global symbols and systems of power through their practices?
By bringing together artists, activists, and scholars, this panel considers diasporic monuments, in order to highlight the stakes of monumentality in art, and complicate its longstanding discursive coordinates.
Move Along! Prefabrication,
Placemaking and Precarious Housing
Session will
present: In-Person
Adrian Anagnost, Tulane University and Jesse Lockard, University of Chicago
Email Address(s): aana...@tulane.edu ,
jloc...@uchicago.edu
Histories of architectural prefabrication highlight two primary trajectories. Techno-enthusiasts promote the potential for flat-packed designer dwellings to revolutionize modern life. Historians focused on market forces highlight the role of factory-built houses in providing affordable, permanent homes for millions. This panel addresses a third, lesser told history of prefabrication, imbricated in material realities of war, colonial campaigns, environmental transformation and housing insecurity. We examine structures made to be moved from factory to site, but designed to allow movement to continue. Ease of assembly and reassembly, mobility, de-mountability, and swift construction by low skilled laborers, were—and remain—characteristics of built environments such as military encampments, colonizing outposts, disaster response zones and temporary agricultural settlements. Often, the refugees, soldiers or migrant workers who inhabit these structures are expected to remain on the move, to avoid making a site their home. This panel explores the politics and poetics of prefabricated placemaking. We ask: how does this lens make visible understudied populations and historical events? How can studying the impermanent presence of structures in a landscape foreground the aesthetics of site for architectural history? How has the inherent dislocation of movable architecture challenged historiography, theory and canon, beyond agitations of celebrated vanguardists? We solicit papers mining this critical vein of architectural history from any methodological angle. In recognition of the objects’ inherent movability, as well as the transnational character of the violence and crises in which these design practices are enmeshed, we set no geographical or chronological bounds on research.
Negotiating Newness:
Contemporary Women Artists’ and Architects’ Practices in the United Arab
Emirates
Session will
present: In-Person
Woodman Lyon Taylor, Independent and Sabrina De Turk, Zayed University
Email Address(s): woodman...@gmail.com ,
sab...@sabrinadeturk.com
This session explores how women practitioners of contemporary arts and architecture working in the United Arab Emirates negotiate new meanings for their contemporary creative works. Some of these meanings are specific to the region and the artists’ position as women in society, yet they also reflect transcultural interactions between the Gulf and Arab, Iranian, South Asian as well as African and other larger global cultural realms. Countering earlier considerations of Gulf cultures as but regional variants of a homogenous ‘Arab’ culture, presenters are invited to explicate the cultural forms created by women artists and architects in the UAE through their dynamic interactions with global art movements to create work which is unique in its new visuality and that also gives voice to women’s points of view.
In addition to scholars’ presentations, the session also solicits women artists from the region to present their own practices as a proactive way to incorporate Arab women artists’ voices into discourses on arts from the region. This also will create the unique opportunity to generate dialog between scholars, practicing women artists as well as the conference audience, breaking down old hierarchies privileging scholars’ points of view over the subjects of their study. Ideally, this could lead to new ways of incorporating Arab women artists’ and architects’ voices into new histories of contemporary art and architecture in the Gulf region.
Rethinking the Body in Art
from Imperial Russia to Post-Soviet Space
Session will
present: Virtual
Affiliated
Society or Committee Name: Society of Historians of East European,
Eurasian, and Russian Art and Architecture
Samuel Johnson, Syracuse University and Aglaya K. Glebova, University of California,
Berkeley
Email Address(s): sjoh...@syr.edu ,
aglaya....@berkeley.edu
This panel seeks to critically examine the place of the body in the visual arts of Russia and Eastern Europe. For much of the modern era, the human animal was assumed to be the true subject of the arts, whether as the standard of measure and proportion, bearer of social convention, or agent of meaningful action. As the era of humanism slips further into the past, the human subject is now more commonly treated as the effect of power than its source. We seek proposals from scholars engaged with problems of the human figure and the body in the broadest sense in Eastern and Central Europe, the territories of the Russian Empire, the USSR, and post-Soviet space. Our questions include the following: how have the arts been imbricated within regionally specific hierarchies of gender and race? In what ways have artistic practices been informed or justified by the body as a source of vital energy, host of disease, or object of research? How has the creation of architectural or urban spaces been shaped by the human figure as a measure of utility or symbol of order and organic integration? In what sense has the retrieval of the body as a locus of passion, suffering, or violence made it relevant to anti-humanist practices of performance or institutional critique? In addition to these questions, we invite proposals from scholars exploring new tools or research perspectives, including interdisciplinary approaches, that enable us to grasp these issues most effectively.
Sculpture, Site, and Space:
Objects and Environments in Germany, Scandinavia, and Central Europe
Session will
present: In-Person
Affiliated
Society or Committee Name: Historians of German, Scandinavian, and
Central European Art and Architecture
Jacqueline E. Jung, Yale University
Email Address(s): jacquel...@yale.edu
From the ancient Jupiter Columns marking divine presence in Roman provincial settlements, to statues of notable men that glorified the military and political exploits of the past, to abstract memorials to the victims of modern mass atrocities, sculptural objects have long shaped people’s experience of public space, social relationships, historical consciousness, and sacred/mythical time across German-speaking lands, Scandinavia, and Central Europe. This session examines the manifold ways in which sculptural objects have harnessed meaning from, activated, and transformed the spaces around them, whether primarily through their formal aspects, their representational content, or their material presence.
The session casts a wide geographic and temporal view: topics might include large-scale, free-standing public works in urban settings or rural landscapes; works of immoveable architectural sculpture; objects made for distinct interior spaces, such as tomb effigies or altarpieces; or works in museums whose very dislocation, far from their point of origin, calls attention to the power of objects to both collapse spatial-temporal distances and reaffirm them.
Substance: Material Design
Histories
Session will
present: In-Person
Grace Lees-Maffei, University of
Hertfordshire and Kjetil Fallan, University of Oslo
Email Address(s): g.lees...@herts.ac.uk ,
kjetil...@ifikk.uio.no
Design and mass production are implicated in our global climate crisis. The fallout of industrialisation, continuing reliance on fossil fuels, the materials from which our natural and built environments, their properties, applications, and meanings, are made – all of these are factors in the current condition of unsustainability and the quest for sustainability. Designers are reorienting their practices towards environmentally sustainable solutions while historians are writing new environmentally-aware design histories. Materials, as the very substance of design, are at the heart of this challenge.
Raw materials and their processing are politically freighted, as recent postcolonial and decolonising work in design history has shown. At the same time, digital culture—which has its own contested materiality—has promoted maker culture and a correlative return to craft. How things are made, and from which materials, are critical for the future of the planet, and are contested, by big business, multinational corporations, hacktivists and makers alike. We all need to be more aware of the significance and implications of the huge variety of materials from which the designed world is made. Design history can assist in that effort.
This panel responds to recent currents in design history and beyond to provide a focus for work which re-evaluates the impacts of industrialisation and its materials, for instance from postcolonial and decolonizing stances, understands the place of materials in environmental histories of design, engages with postcolonial approaches to the politics of materials, raw and processed, and foregrounds materials-aware methods including embodied research and sensory engagement.
Whose Heritage? Global,
National and Local Debates on the Protection, Restoration and Restitution of
Cultural Heritage
Session will
present: In-Person
Affiliated
Society or Committee Name: International Committee
Anna Sigrídur Arnar, Minnesota State University
Moorhead
Email Address(s): ar...@mnstate.edu
A rapid succession of events in the 21st century has cast the problem of cultural heritage into sharp relief. From the 2001 bombing of the Bamiyan Buddhas to the 2003 looting of Bagdad’s Iraq Museum, to the more recent attacks on the Libraries of Timbuktu, Mali, or the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria, these destructive actions have galvanized international efforts to strengthen legal, military, and ethical protocols for the protection of cultural heritage. In addition to damage from armed conflict, natural disasters and environmental devastation due to global warming have exacerbated the destruction of cultural sites. Last but not least, renewed debates in the wake of postcolonialism about the restitution of cultural objects to their place of origin have critically underscored not only the need to preserve cultural heritage, but to ask who are the rightful stewards and interpreters of cultural heritage? While major intergovernmental agencies, transnational NGOs, and prominent private institutions have supported important cultural heritage initiatives, this panel seeks papers that focus on overlooked or lesser known stakeholders in the debates over cultural heritage. The panel also welcomes proposals investigating individuals or entities directly engaged in the negotiation between vested interests in cultural heritage or in carrying out the tactical labor of preservation. How are the potentially competing demands of global, national and local claims reconciled? Is there a need to develop experimental protocols or a new language for ensuring equitable outcomes? What are the critical lessons or preventative measures that can shape future policy and practice?
Women in Architecture: The
African Exchange
Session will
present: In-Person
Elisa Dainese
Email Address(s): daines...@gmail.com
In recent years there has been an international resurgence of interest in modern architecture and urban design in Africa, especially the work of male designers in the African regions. On the other hand, the African legacy of women in architecture and related overseas exchanges have largely been ignored or relegated to be a minor topic by mainstream historiography. While examples on Jane Drew’s housing in Ghana and Denise Scott Brown’s “African view of Las Vegas” are known, more recent scholarship, for example on Ute Baumbach’s involvement in Ethiopia and Erica Mann’s master plan for Nairobi, have only initiated the exploration of a subject that deserves consideration in its own right.
This session wishes to fill the lacuna. By applying an intersectional lens, it proposes to investigate the role of women architects, their individual motivations within African specificities, and the embedding in original or existing networks connecting Africa, North-America and Europe. Papers should cover a key period in women’s history, from the 1960s to the ‘80s–from when feminist debate emerged prominently in iconic architecture schools to the end of the second wave of feminism—but earlier examples could also be discussed. Papers are welcome that explore hidden histories of women in design and their experience of migration to and from Africa. Topics might include, but are not limited to, the diaspora of women’s architectural ideas, the surging interest in women’s work in publications and conferences, the role of women in African schools or their relations with overseas institutes.