European Architectural History Network (EAHN) Thematic Conference 2027: Moving Parts.

The EAHN thematic conference Moving Parts examines architecture as a field constituted through movement. It argues that movement, understood as the displacement and transformation of things and ideas across space and time, has always shaped architectural production. However, the mobilization of people, labor, materials, technologies, images, and capital has rapidly accelerated since the onset of global capitalism, as technologies of logistics and information have amplified processes of circulation and globalization.

This conference proposes to examine architecture as a field constituted through movement across different temporalities and geographies. By foregrounding movement as an analytic rather than merely descriptive condition, the conference brings into a single framework four interrelated strands of inquiry. Together, these strands position movement as a methodological lens through which architecture can be analysed as a process rather than a static artefact. Submissions are welcome that address any of the following categories:

(A) Labor and expertise — such as the migration of skilled and unskilled workers, the transfer of knowledge, and systems of management
(B) Material and infrastructural flows — including the circulation of materials, technologies, and energy, and the logistical systems that organize them
(C) Financial and regulatory circulation — involving capital, standards, and governance structures
(D) Media, forms, and afterlives — that may encompass the movement of images, typologies, and buildings across contexts and time

The conference foregrounds the conditions of global capitalism, but is not limited to the modern or contemporary period. Contributions addressing the early modern era, when empires, trade networks, artisanal migrations, and the circulation of images and building knowledge already structured architectural production across wide geographies, are equally welcome. We particularly encourage submissions that examine the architectures and geographies of Southeast Asia in relation to Europe and wider circuits of exchange.
In methodological terms, the conference invites participants to think across scales, from the movement of a single detail, drawing, worker, or commodity to the broader systems of trade, finance, governance, and mediation in which such movements are embedded. It welcomes papers that trace concrete trajectories as well as those that reflect on the conceptual and historiographic implications of studying architecture through its moving parts.

The Call for Papers opens on September 1, 2026 and closes on December 1, 2026.

Abstracts (300 words maximum) and a two-page CV should be submitted to mpartshku.hk

Requests for further information can be directed to Emma Letizia Jones or Davide Spina at mpartshku.hk
further information: https://movingparts.arch.hku.hk