CFP: A Strange Utility: Architecture Toward Other Ends
Conference

Keynote Speaker: Jill L. Stoner, Associate Professor of Architecture,
UC Berkeley

Ours is an era of austerity measures, global economic turmoil, and
resource depletion in which the utility, or “use value” of any
product, resource, or process is championed as its foremost virtue.
Politicians aspire to budgets that maintain only the most functional
and necessary line-items and consumers seek products that are
economical in their use of resources or their adaptability from one
utility to another—for example, cars that use only a limited amount of
gasoline, furniture that converts into other uses, cell phones that
are also computers, cameras, and personal navigation systems.

Of course, the discipline of architecture has always been linked to
the idea of utility—albeit in a variety of ways and to different
degrees. From architecture’s putative origins as a primitive form of
shelter made of foliage to the Modernist dictum that form follows
function, architecture, from the beginning, has been required to
perform a “useful” function. Not surprisingly, utility remains a
central concern within contemporary architectural practice, but
alongside some of the obvious benefits—the development of more energy
efficient materials and processes and the economic incentive to
redevelop existing buildings before building anew—have come some
strange, if understudied effects. It is now common to describe the
inhabitants of buildings as “users,” a turn of phrase that subtly
positions architecture as a product whose value, in the end, is
determined primarily by the function of its use, and its inhabitants,
in the end, as consumers of space, rather than active participants who
engage with and indeed transform space through their habits,
interventions, and rituals.

Meanwhile, outside the confines of mainstream practice, architecture
is being appropriated to ends that seem to dramatically expand and
estrange the familiar notion of utility. For example, contemporary
Polish artist Monika Sosnowska recently used the twisted architectural
form of a Soviet-bloc government building as a metaphor for the
pressures exerted upon now-collapsed political regimes. Likewise,
artists Paul Pfeiffer, Thomas Demand, and James Casebere have all used
the architectural model (and its subsequent imaging) as a vehicle for
addressing historical and societal ills, their photographs addressing
subjects such as the atomization of the crowd at the sports arena, the
history of American slavery, and the atrocities of Nazi Germany. At
the same time, for revered science-fiction author Bruce Sterling,
architecture is the very medium through which future worlds are
destroyed, imagined, and rebuilt. Moreover, within the sphere of
architecture itself, as envisioned by Jean-Gilles Décosterd and
Philippe Rahm, the built environment is designed to incite
physiological and biological responses; indeed, for many avant-garde
architects, architecture is both a medium and means to an
unconventional end, one part of an equation that considers, among many
influences, the social, cultural, mythological, economic,
electromagnetic, biological and chemical interactions between our
bodies and the built environments they engage.

Recognizing the contemporary currency of utility, this symposium seeks
unexpected ways of defining this term within and with respect to the
built environment. Submissions sought include, but are not limited to,
academic papers, performances, audience-participatory projects,
poetry, and prose. This symposium will be structured around a series
of events and speakers that grapple with the following questions: how
and who has defined architecture’s use-value, its utility? How can
turning to other disciplines’ unexpected utilization of architecture
expand architects’ and architectural historians’ perception of
architecture’s utility? And, what are architecture’s future utilities?
As architecture’s primary function is called into question daily, we
may find that the answer to architecture’s future lies precisely in
its strange utility.

Please send and abstract and cv to:

Nora Wendl
Assistant Professor, Architecture
School of Architecture
University of North Carolina Charlotte
Email: nwendluncc.edu

Isabelle Loring Wallace
Associate Professor, Contemporary Art and Theory
Department of Art History
Lamar Dodd School of Art
University of Georgia, Athens
Email: iwallaceuga.edu