From: Wallis Miller
Subject: CFP: Architecture as an Expanded Practice - Session at SAH 2022 Annual International Conference

Architecture as an Expanded Practice

While architectural history is anchored in built form, it also reveals that architects turn their expertise to other kinds of projects, raising questions about the nature of architecture as a discipline or practice. This session will address these questions with papers that examine the transfer of architectural methods, strategies, standards and conceptualizations to projects that do not produce built forms and are typically identified with other disciplines or practices. The goal is to discuss architecture's engagement with and impact on other disciplines as well as the expansion of architectural practice itself.

Histories demonstrate that architecture has rarely fit comfortably within disciplinary and professional boundaries because it is often involved in their transgression. Rather than try to dissolve the boundaries, the session proposes to trace their evolution in order to understand the expansion of architecture as the result of its infiltration of other disciplines and practices. As much as it has asserted its own approach, architecture has also changed to work within the approach of another discipline or practice. Furniture and product designs are the most common examples; others include providing solutions for forensics by modeling crimes or for agriculture and commerce by organizing food distribution supply chains. The session will compare the incarnations of expanded practice over time through papers that discuss examples in the period between the late nineteenth century and the present. Examples from anywhere in the world are welcome.

In 1968 Hans Hollein claimed that "Everything is Architecture." Earlier, Le Corbusier wrote that "Architecture is in the telephone and in the Parthenon." Both pointed to a definition of architecture that included more than buildings. But rather than cast the world in architecture's image, as they did, the session will explore examples that reveal the productive differences between architecture and the other disciplines or practices it has served.

Session Chair: Wallis Miller, University of Kentucky

For submission guidelines please see: ​https://www.sah.org/2022/call-for-papers