[1] Habitat 67 and Post-war Architecture

From: legault.rejeanuqam.ca
Date: 1 Jun 20

Session Chair: Réjean Legault, Université du Québec à Montréal

Along with Buckminster Fuller’s US Pavilion built for Expo67, Habitat 67 is Montreal’s most iconic and internationally known work of post-war architecture. Designed by Moshe Safdie, an Israeli-born Canadian trained at McGill University, and subsidized by a governmental agency, Habitat is an experimental high-density urban housing complex. Its 158 apartment units are made of 354 prefabricated reinforced concrete modules stacked 12-storeys high in an irregular stepped-up pattern.

From the moment the project’s first images were published to the day of its inauguration, Habitat captured the architectural world’s attention, and was widely disseminated in the professional press (Beringer, 2014). Straddling typological and technological innovation, the project seemed to engage many issues in contemporary debates on the future of modern architecture. Over the years, Habitat has been read through various critical lenses, having been successively interpreted as a megastructure (Banham, 1976), a Mediterranean-inspired project (Sorkin, 1996), an embodiment of humanist architecture (Albrecht, 2010), and a representative of the Brutalist style (SOS Brutalism, 2018). Rarely, however, has Habitat been the subject of in-depth historical investigation. With the exception of Riar’s exploration of Habitat’s theoretical origins (2014), this groundbreaking complex is still in need of deeper analysis.

This session invites papers that address the before, during, and after of Habitat 67: its sources, commission, construction, critical reception, interpretation, as well as its impact on later models and practices. Papers may also explore ideas, protagonists, institutions, debates, and events, as well as projects and buildings that came to play a role in the complex’s history. Where does Habitat fit within the architectural history of post-war movements, of social housing, of geometrical experiments, of prefabrication, of industrialized construction, of megastructures, of brutalism? The goal of the session is to contribute to the reassessment of
Habitat’s place within the theory, practice, and culture of post-war architecture.

Please submit proposals to: https://www.sah.org/2021/call-for-papers

For questions, please contact Professor Réjean Legault, École de design, Université du Québec à Montréal, E-mail: legault.rejeanuqam.ca

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[2] Utopias of the Self

From: voeyeprinceton.edu
Date: 1 Jun 20

Session Chairs: Victoria Bugge Øye, Princeton University, and Larry Busbea, University of Arizona
Modern architecture was perennially burdened with the tasks of initiating either a “new age” or cultivating a “new human,” alternating between which should precede the other to effect the most profound social transformations. But as much as it was revolutionary, avant-garde design was equally reparative and ameliorative--an apparatus at once inextricably bound to modernity, and at the same time imagined as a cure against its ills. This reparative conception posited a human subject understood not only in social, but in physiological, spiritual, and, increasingly, psychological registers. As such, avant-garde architecture and design culture constituted one of the most enduring religio-therapeutic complexes of the twentieth century. After WWII, its revolutionary ambitions shorn away, modern architecture developed toward an ostensibly more grounded and pragmatic engagement with social life. Frequently, though, this thin veneer of realism was pulled aside to reveal persistent metaphysical aspirations. By the end of the 1960s these aspirations joined another “New Age”; a newly institutionalized and commodified therapeutic culture that promoted the agency and authority of the individual over their psychic fates and environmental circumstances alike.

While architecture’s complicity in processes of subjectivation is commonly acknowledged as a function of modernity, dominant (Marxist) histories have mostly eschewed considerations of the individual subject, dismissing it as an alibi for the interpellation of broader social categories. This panel asks instead how architectural history might deal with these categories not as fixed, but as alternating patterns of self and collective, personal and political, secular and sacred, inside and outside. We welcome papers that explore how religio-therapeutic practices have informed and/or are informed by post-WWII architectural culture, but we are also interested in earlier iterations of architecture’s engagement in questions of therapy, wellness, mind-body intersections, self-development, psychology, consciousness, and personality.

Submission Guidelines:
- Abstracts must be under 300 words.
- The title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation.
- Abstracts and titles must follow the Chicago Manual of Style.
- Only one abstract per conference by an author or co-author may be submitted.
- A maximum of two (2) authors per abstract will be accepted.
- Please attach a two-page CV in PDF format.
- Abstracts are to be submitted online using the link below.

For more information or to submit: https://www.sah.org/2021/call-for-papers

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[3] Early Modern Production and Conversion of Architectural Knowledge

From: gulkalecunet.carleton.ca
Date: 29 May 20

Session Chairs: Gül Kale, Carleton University and Juan Luis Burke, University of Maryland
This session explores transregional productions and conversions of architectural knowledge in the early modern period, from the 16th to the mid-18th centuries. How was knowledge produced in workshops, on-site, or through books? What kinds of knowledge circulated through material, visual, and textual sources during cross-cultural interactions? What kind of transformations or conversions did they go through in global encounters? Recently, knowledge production through architectural practices and material encounters became important themes. Scholars attended to new venues of knowledge in workshops, construction sites, academies, laboratories, and travels. Diverse groups, including scholars, officials, scientists, and architects, interacted in contact zones. However, this issue remained underexplored at a transregional and global level. How did diverse forms of knowledge on built environments circulate globally with the movement of architects, ideas, images, and objects? Which political, scientific, topographical, and cultural contexts transformed them in new locales? How did this new knowledge transform the architectural practice and theory in Europe, the Middle East, the Americas, and Asia? This panel will address questions on the ways in which visual, material and intellectual circulations transformed and converted architectural knowledge both in practice and theory. Themes may include: early modern map-making and geospatial knowledge of cities during exploration and colonization ventures; patterns, sketches, and drawings for circulating architectural knowledge; representations of new building types including hospices and coffeehouses by travelers for different purposes; knowledge production through military engineering; formation of architectural practices in colonial and viceregal settings; indigenous-settler relations in colonial architecture; writing, translating, or interpreting architectural treatises or texts in vernacular languages; receptions of European architectural treatises across the globe; new botanical knowledge in garden design; and classifications of architectural knowledge of the world in books, encyclopedias, and museums. Papers that discuss interactions between the Middle East or Latin America with Europe, Asia, and Africa, are particularly welcomed.

For more information or to submit: https://www.sah.org/2021/call-for-papers