Call for Papers: Architectural Theory Review, volume 18 issue 3
To be published December 2013

Special Issue: Reception
Editor: Dr Naomi Stead

This special issue of Architectural Theory Review seeks to explore the
architectural implications of reception theory, and the concept of
reception. In keeping with the journal’s editorial emphasis on
‘review,’ the issue will reappraise and reconsider what this concept
might offer across the disciplines of media studies, cultural studies,
literary studies, and into architecture.

Examining the way in which works of art and culture are received by
audiences in different times and places, reception studies looks to
how works are understood, how they have meaning, and what are the
material and social conditions at the interface between works and
their uptake. Reception theory is distinct from audience studies,
partly in its focus on intellectual history, and partly in its
emphasis on dissonance: on resistance or negotiation on the part of
the reader/viewer. Emerging from historical and literary studies,
reception theory moved into cultural and media studies in the 1960s,
where it had a long heyday, and later into classics where it enjoyed a
‘boom’ in the 2000s.

Throughout the ages and stages of reception theory, it has rarely been
considered as a concept in architecture. Partly this is a result of
disciplinary convention: the history of architecture has tended to
concentrate more on the production of buildings than their reception,
and (with important exceptions) scholarship has frequently focussed on
the author and work, rather than the reader and text. Buildings have
been approached in terms of their patrons, clients, architectural
authors, and design concepts before and during construction, rather
than their expanded social life (or afterlife) beyond practical
completion.

Reception theory has occasionally entered into architectural
historiography, with its meta-analyses of how historic buildings and
events mean different things to different groups at different times,
but this has most often been an implicit rather than explicit
presence. Furthermore, the popular reception of buildings – of
architecture beyond the field of architecture - has not often been
addressed, nor has the idea that architecture may be actually
constituted in the negotiations, productions and mis-readings of
amateur, as well as expert, recipients.

It is now accepted that architecture has had a close, even dependent
relationship on media – of both generation and representation -
throughout the modern period. Indeed, architecture has legitimately
been described as a ‘media construction.’ In media studies, the early
intellectual framing of reception was influenced by communication
theory and semiotics, including Stuart Hall’s influential theory of
how media messages are encoded and decoded. Later iterations
concentrated on ethnographic studies of how individual media
productions such as specific television or radio programmes were taken
up in particular subcultures, and on the quantification of reception
in television and radio ‘ratings.’ Reception theory implied a move
away from earlier implications of an inert consumer who passively
‘receives’ culture, which stands at odds with a newer conception of
the active and engaged ‘reader’ of cultural texts, after the death of
the author.

Reception theory was also, in part, a critique of the idea that
meaning is immanent in a text. Arguing that approaches such as the
‘New Criticism’ tended to fetishise texts as formal and autonomous
objects, and failed to take account of the effects and creative
potential of contexts and contingencies, reception theory instead
focuses on practices: embodied, performed, and informed by a specific
and unique set of circumstances. It demonstrates that the meaning of a
text is always a dynamic negotiation, that texts and contexts can
never really be distinguished as one can never know a text outside of
its specific reception processes. Today, in a contemporary media
environment of ‘produsers’ and interactive participatory culture,
media audiences are likely to be considered to be active agents
making, appropriating, and remixing media and culture, and thus in
remaking it anew.

This special issue proposes that, despite the complexities and
limitations of reception theory, such a concept may still have
valuable resonance for the field of architecture, perhaps now more
than ever. Scholars from diverse disciplines including architecture,
media studies, cultural studies, literature, the arts and other
fields, are invited to consider alignments between reception theory
and architecture. Contributions might address, but need not be limited
to, the following topics:

- Reception, ‘appreciation’, ratings, and architectural criticism
- Post-occupancy evaluation and/as reception in architecture
- Architecture and its audiences, communities, readers, and publics
- Architecture in popular cultures, and the popularity of architecture
- What might fan culture mean in architecture?
- Reception and the everyday
- ethnographic approaches to the occupation and use of buildings
- The reception of architecture into and through other media and art
practices
- The possibilities of new media for facilitating and documenting the
reception of buildings

Architectural Theory Review, founded at the University of Sydney in
1996, and now in its eighteenth year, is the pre-eminent journal of
architectural theory in the Australasian region. Now published by
Taylor and Francis in print and online, the journal is an
international forum for generating, exchanging and reflecting on
theory in and of architecture. All texts are subject to a rigorous
process of blind peer review.

Enquiries about this special issue theme, and possible papers, are
welcome – please email the editor Dr Naomi Stead n.steaduq.edu.au.

The deadline for the submission of completed manuscripts is Monday 1st
July 2013. Please submit manuscripts via the journal’s website:
http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/ratr

When uploading your manuscript please indicate that you are applying
for this special issue (vol. 18.3 - Reception) since the journal has
two Calls for Papers currently in circulation.

Manuscript submission guidelines can be found at:
www.tandfonline.com/action/authorSubmission?journalCode=ratr20&page=instructions