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Interstices Symposium: Registration and Final Program
In Uncategorized on October 26, 2011 at 16:39REGISTER FOR THE INTERSTICES SYMPOSIUM ONLINE HERE
DOWNLOAD FINAL PROGRAM: Interstices 2011 final program
DOWNLOAD ABSTRACTS: Interstices 2011 Abstracts
Interstices Under Construction Symposium:
Technics, Memory and the Architecture of History
25-27 November 2011, University of Tasmania, Launceston, Tasmania
FINAL Program
Friday 25 November
Nualla O’Flaherty Theatre, The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery
| 4pm – 4.15pm | Opening Address |
| 4.15pm – 5.45pm | FRAME Stuart King: Landscape and the Mnemotechnics of Tasmanian Architectural History; Nicole Sully: Destruction of the Dialectics of Memory: Reimagining and Reremembering the Works of Minoru Yamasaki; Hannah Lewi: Deranging Oneself in Someone Else’s House |
| 5.45pm – 6.15pm | Interstices 12 Journal Launch and Cocktails |
| 6.15pm – 7.30pm | KEY SPEAKER 1 Alessandra Ponte: The Archives of the Planet: Cinema, Photography and Memory 1908–31 |
Saturday 26 November
School of Visual and Performing Arts, School of Architecture & Design
| 9am – 10.30am | LANDSCAPE School of Visual and Performing Arts Foyer Gini Lee: Re-enacting Stonescape: Territories Under Construction Brought to Presence; Linda Marie Walker: Untitled Procedures; Jacqueline Power + Marilyne Nicholls: Intertwined: Ring Trees in Wadi Wadi Country |
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| 10.30am – 11am | MORNING TEA School of Architecture & Design Foyer |
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| 11am – 12pm | KEY SPEAKER 2 School of Architecture & Design Lecture Theatre Jeff Malpas: Building Memory |
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| 12pm – 1pm | LUNCH School of Architecture & Design Foyer |
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| 1pm – 2.30pm | SESSION 1: CINEMA School of Architecture & Design Seminar Room Level 1 Michael Tawa: To Be Two. Interstice and Deconstitution in Cinema and Architecture; Jane Madsen: The Space of Collapse: A Two Part Terrain; Nikos Papastergiadis: TBC |
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| 1pm – 2.30pm | SESSION 2: PSYCHE School of Architecture & Design Seminar Room Level 2 Jen Brown: Projecting Brisbane: Lines of F/light in the 2011 Post-Flood Festival; Simon Bourke: Interstices and the Aerial Viewpoint: Reconstructing the Complexity of the ‘Normal’ Experience; John Roberts: The Ruins are Wonderful so Why Worry? Ruins as Historical ‘Image-Objects’ for Aalto and Utzon |
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| 2.30pm – 3pm | AFTERNOON TEA School of Architecture & Design Foyer |
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| 3pm – 4.30pm | SESSION 1: SPIRIT School of Architecture & Design Seminar Room Level 1 Anuradha Chatterjee: Birth, Death and Rebirth: Reconstruction of Architecture in Ruskin’s Writings; Hayley Wright: Catastrophic Facadism: The Authentic Imitation; Fiona Gray: Paper and Fire – The Images and Ashes of Rudolf Steiner’s Architecture |
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| 3pm – 5.00pm | SESSION 2: ICON School of Architecture & Design Seminar Room Level 2 Iman Al-Attar: Between the ‘represented’ and ‘representing’: The crisis of Urban History and the Techniques of Historiography; Tania Davidge: Catastrophe and Memorialisation: Reflecting on the Architectural After-Effects of September 11; James Lewis: Understanding the Iconic Icon; Tanja Poppelreuter: Mneme of Space |
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| 5pm – 5.30pm | DRINKS School of Architecture & Design Foyer |
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| 5.30pm – 6.30pm | KEY SPEAKER 3 School of Architecture & Design Lecture Theatre (videoconference link to London) Peg Rawes: Spinoza’s Geometric Ecology |
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| 8pm | DINNER Northern Club, 61 Cameron Street, Launceston |
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Sunday 27 November
School of Visual and Performing Arts
| 9am – 10.30am | DOMESTIC Sean Pickersgill: A Memory of Entropy – Architecture in Tarkovsky’s Stalker; Sandra Löschke: Techniques of Display – On Constructing and Mediating Cultural and Aesthetic Values in Exhibition Environments; Kirsty Volz: The French Polisher and the Unsentimental Interior |
| 10.30am – 11am | MORNING TEA School of Visual and Performing Arts |
| 11am – 12pm | KEY SPEAKER 4 Karen Burns: Signs, Symptoms and the Index: Depicting Past and Present at Purrumbete, 1901–02 |
| 12pm – 1pm | LUNCH School of Visual and Performing Arts |
| 1pm – 2pm | KEY SPEAKER 5 William Taylor: Architectural Typologies and the Mnemotechnics of Rebuilding in Recent Post-Disaster Scenarios |
| 2pm – 3pm | PLENARY SESSION |
REGISTER FOR THE INTERSTICES SYMPOSIUM ONLINE HERE
Update: Technics, Memory and the Architecture of History
In Uncategorized on October 3, 2011 at 13:42Planning for the 2011 Interstices Under Construction Symposium is well underway. We have accepted twenty blind refereed abstracts, and are in the process of programming the event. We will be publishing the accepted abstracts and the preliminary schedule on this website in the next week or so.
We have also confirmed our five key anchor papers:
The Archives of the Planet: Cinema, Photography and Memory, 1908-1931
Prof Alessandra Ponte, Université de Montréal
The example of “Archives of the Planet”, perhaps the most significant legacy of the lifework of the French Jewish banker of Albert Kahn (1860-1940), provides an extraordinary entry point for the study of one of the key moments in the history of representation when the introduction of new technologies of mechanical reproduction induced a radical transformation in the thinking about memory, perception and knowledge. Inspired by the philosophy of Henri Bergson, lifelong friend and tutor of Albert Kahn, and functioning under the scientific direction of the human geographer Jean Brunhes, the Archives de la Planète operated between 1908 and 1931. Completely funded by Kahn, eleven independent photographers and cameramen – including the biologist Jean Comandon, a pioneer in the fields of micro-photography and scientific cinema –collected an immense ethno-geographic visual catalogue of the planet composed of 72,000 colour autochrome photographs, 4,000 stereographic images, and nearly 100 hours of mostly black and white documentary films. In two decades, the teams of the Archives of the Planet visited more than 40 countries to fulfill the mission defined by Albert Kahn in one of his rare written pronouncements, i.e. to record the traditional costumes, modes of production and ways of life that rapid processes of modernisation were erasing all over the globe. Beyond the opportunity of reconnoitring the redefinition of memory prompted by new technologies, the case of Kahn’s collections offers therefore an opening to explore and scrutinise a crucial phase in the history of the twentieth century re-foundation of the notions of archive, milieu and habitat.
Alessandra Ponte is full professor at the École d’architecture, Université de Montréal. She has taught history and theory of architecture and landscape at Pratt Institute (New York), Princeton University, Cornell University, Instituto Universitario di Architettura (Venice), and ETH (Zurich). She has written articles and essays in numerous international publications, published a volume on Richard Payne Knight and the Eighteenth-Century Picturesque (Paris, 2000) and co-edited, with Antoine Picon, a collection of papers on architecture and the sciences (New York 2003). For the last four years she has been responsible for the conception and organisation of the Phyllis Lambert Seminar, a series colloquia on contemporary architectural topics. She has recently organised the exhibition Total Environment: Montreal 1965-1975 (Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, March- August 2009). She is currently completing a series of investigations about the North American landscapes and preparing a show and catalogue on François Dallegret (AA School, London, Fall 2011).
Architectural typologies and the mnemotechnics of rebuilding in recent post-disaster scenarios
Prof William Taylor, University of Western Australia
Reconstruction discourse for a number of post-disaster settings and scenarios has led to a renewal of typological studies. This has commonly involved a turn to architectural history and analyses of vernacular architecture in the effort to propose novel building types more likely to protect communities against loss of life and property. Varied arguments for the adaption and ‘improvement’ of traditional Southeast Asian village architecture, the New Orleans raised cottage or Queenslander (to name a few cases) prompt a number of questions relating to conference themes. How does the appropriation of historical building forms engage different pasts in order to predict and forestall future catastrophe? What building types are chosen, how are they adapted and how does this process elicit understandings of memory and architectural heritage? How are communities defined as socio-logical and psychological entities by the selection of building forms that aim not only to resist cyclonic winds, floods and earthquakes, but also to provide for community recuperation and emotional catharsis following a catastrophic event? How can culture and politics enter the picture?
William M. Taylor is Professor of Architecture at the University of Western Australia where he teaches architectural design and history and theory of the built environment. Recent publications include The Vital Landscape, Nature and the Built Environment in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate 2004) and a co-edited collection of essays An Everyday Transience: The Urban Imaginary of Goldfields Photographer John Joseph Dwyer (UWA Publishing 2010). A co-authored book Prospects for An Ethics of Architecture (Routledge 2011) results from his collaboration with Professor Michael Levine (Philosophy UWA). He is currently researching the subject of architecture and transience.
Spinoza’s geometric ecology
Dr Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture UCL
This paper explores the construction of a radical and ‘technical’ expression of Nature/Substance in Spinoza’s geometric text, The Ethics (1677). It suggests that Spinoza’s seventeenth-century geometric analysis of subjectivity provides a fascinating historical technicity in discussions of aesthetics, matter and subjectivity, which engages with contemporary ecological politics and agency in the production of the built environment.
Spinoza’s geometric method is driven by his powerful theory of Substance through which he locates a complex biodiversity of life. Substance constitutes a kind of proto-materialist theory insofar as it is the primary univocal ‘cause’ of all realities, the immanent ‘life-force’ in all things, including architectural design practice and geometric thinking. Ecologists and philosophers (e.g. Arne Naess and Eccy de Jong) have discussed the ‘deep ecology’ of Spinoza’s metaphysics of substance or nature. However, this paper considers Spinoza’s invention of these ethical ecological relations through a geometrical technicity in which a plenitude of geometric figures and human, living and natural subjects are constructed. This genetic method therefore opens up the space to discuss geometric thinking, not just as a reductive technical operation of form-making, but as an exemplary mode of biological and material diversification.
An ethical technicity of human emotions or affects is also developed through his psychophysical understanding of geometric relations, constituting a radical critique of subjectivity and ecological relations. As such, Spinoza’s thinking resonates with contemporary visual arts and spatial practices, including, Agnes Denes’ Wheatfield: A Confrontation, 1982, which re-purposed New York’s Battery Park into urban agriculture and which was reconstructed in London in 2009 as part of the Radical Nature exhibition at the Barbican. Under these terms, Denes’ critical and aesthetic (that is, sense-based) spatial intervention recalls Spinoza’s promotion of radical geometric ecologies. Each demonstrates the capacity for a ‘natural’ geometric technicity to generate new figure-subjects and critical spatiotemporal relations and, consequently, to contribute more productively towards contemporary discussions about the wellbeing of diverse modern subjectivities and societies. In addition, considering Spinoza’s own formidable technical and aesthetic labour in geometric thinking (which Bergson identified with the force of a ‘dreadnought’ and an immaterial ‘lightness’ of thought) we might wish to explore the value of his radical aesthetic technicity for generating critical geometric ecologies for contemporary visual arts practices.
Might Spinoza’s ‘natural geometry’ enable debates about the need to design for the diverse social and environmental needs, for example, by contributing to contemporary critiques of agency, or for developing diverse cultures of dwelling? Might his ethical thinking about nature and geometry also help to rethink the commercially-driven fascination in formal geometric production that continues to dominate the discipline (trends which still operate on the basis of understanding geometry as an abstract disembodied set of functions)? In the face of these, and other pressing questions of human difference and well-being, together with the need to protect ecological difference, this paper suggests that Spinoza’s philosophy may provide opportunities through which architecture, and the visual arts, can rethink and value human and environmental biodiversity in the built environment.
Peg Rawes is Director of Architectural Research and Coordinator History and Theory, MArch Architecture (RIBA Part 2), at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her teaching and research in architectural theory and criticism focus on interdisciplinary links between architectural design, philosophy, technology and the visual arts, which has been developed into publications that examine: spatiotemporality and embodiment; ‘minor’ traditions in geometric and spatial thinking; new aesthetic and material practices; relational architectural ecologies. Her research activities and publications include: Relational Architectural Ecologies (forthcoming, 2012); Space, Geometry and Aesthetics (2008); ‘Spatial Imagination’, Designing for the 21st Century (2008); ‘Sonic Envelopes’, Senses and Society, Vol 3, No 1 (2008); Irigaray for Architects (2007); ‘Second-order Cybernetics, Architectural Drawing and Monadic Thinking’, Kybernetes, Vol 38, no 9/10 (2007), and ‘Plenums’, in K. Lloyd Thomas, ed., Material Matters (2006).
Signs, symptoms and the index: depicting past and present at Purrumbete, 1901-02
Dr Karen Burns, Monash University
This paper examines the wall mural, a traditional medium for constructing spatial exchanges between architecture and images. I focus on an unusual 1901-02 mural cycle designed by Walter Withers for the Manifold family at Purrumbete in Victoria’s Western District. The cycle was commissioned as part of an extensive rebuilding of the late Victorian homestead, culminating in a set of public reception rooms decorated with imagery of the pastoral frontier.
In-situ murals were key forms of architectural decoration until the late twentieth century. Murals can narrate both the sited-ness and virtuality of architecture. Since the late Medieval period, western architecture’s window frames, doors and enfilade systems have framed the mural as a view, and later as a picture, making the mural’s otherness consonant with the logic of the interior. However murals can also have a powerful immersive quality, projecting the viewer into another world: in media res. Another function was found for murals as the medium was reinvented towards the end of the nineteenth century when in-situ images were fashioned as external projections of interior psychic states. The Purrumbete murals reveal another function of the architecture/in-situ image intersection. In the Withers decorated reception room architectural systems of spatial articulation produce a powerful counter-weight to the image, constructing a cohesive interior that mitigates against the inconsistencies of the interior image world of the mural narrative, its ideology and viewing positions.
In his book Confronting Images (2009), Georges Didi Huberman argues against art history’s desire to discover legible, coherent narratives in the surface of images, to make the art image “identical to the work of symbolic reason” (Bryson, 1993). Norman Bryson reviewing Huberman’s text was rightly suspicious of any generalised claim for the failure of images to represent, but persuaded by Huberman’s endeavour to historicise “the text or image that builds representational failure into itself” (1993). Whilst Huberman rightly identifies the widespread failure to represent he also gives meaning and legibility to that failure. This paper seizes on two contradictory moments in the commissioning and work of the mural cycle as symptoms – “the suddenly manifested knot of associations or conflicted meaning” – of the mural cycle’s sudden aporias around settler activism in frontier violence and the racialised borders of the new Australian state. This paper examines the role of architecture at Purrumbete in framing the boundaries of past and present, in accommodating the mural cycle’s shifting viewing positions – from intimate witness to minority white Australian – and of the homestead as a powerful indexical referent constructing the meaning of the mural images as documentary site histories. The skilful architectural composition maintains and absorbs the mural cycle’s contradictions without having to resolve them. Ideology is the logic of the dream not analytical reason.
Karen Burns is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history and theory in the Department of Architecture at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Her current research projects include a history of Anglophone feminist architectural theory, practice and research from 1974-2010, a study of fortified civilian architecture on the Port Phillip and Van Diemen’s Land pastoral frontiers and a book-length study of architects, commodities and the industrial marketplace: The Industrial Muse: Architects, Aesthetics and Manufacture in Britain, 1842-1862. Her essays have been published in Assemblage, AD, Transition, Architectural Theory Review and the Journal of Architectural Education (forthcoming and in the following books: Postcolonial Spaces, Desiring Practices and Intimus.
Building memory
Prof Jeff Malpas, University of Tasmania
Image: Leigh Woolley
Memory and place are inextricably linked. Moreover, memory stands in a special relation to built places – to corridors, rooms, buildings streets, neighbourhoods, towns, cities. Thus Bachelard explores memory as given in the house; Benjamin as present in the city and its streets. To understand both, one cannot treat memory as merely some subjective quality attached to the built. The built is formed from memory and memory from the built. Often overlooked in those forms of architectural practice given over to the technical and the representational, the intimate connection of building and memory nevertheless indicates the centrality of building in the formation of the fundamental fabric of human life. The weave of memory and of meaning is accomplished in the built form of house, street, and city, rather than in some inner sanctum of the mind.
Jeff Malpas is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania and Distinguished Visiting Professor at La Trobe University. He has written extensively on issues of place and space and his newest book, Heidegger and the Thinking of Place, will appear in January 2012 with MIT Press.
A link to the registration form for the symposium with payment details will be posted in the next few days. The registration fee is A$100 for participants (undergraduate and masters by coursework students free).
There is a range of accommodation nearby to the Inveresk Campus of the University of Tasmania which includes the following:
- City Park Grand
- Peppers Seaport Hotel
- The Sebel Launceston
- Hotel Charles
- Hotel Grand Chancellor
- Mecure Launceston
The Interstices Symposium will be appearing as a part of the inaugural Tasmanian Breath of Fresh Air (BOFA) Film Festival, which is occurring at the same time and in the same location. It is advisable to book accommodation early owing to BOFA. For information on BOFA, visit http://bofa.com.au/2011/
The Call for Papers for Technics, Memory and the Architecture of History (Interstices13) will be published here in early December 2011. Submissions will be due in by early March 2012 for publication in October 2012. Watch this space.
Notes for Contributors are available here. They are updated from time to time so please check for currency before submission.
For more permanent information (overview of previous issues and sample papers to download), please visit our website (www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz). To order online, please go to the MagMag website.
See you in November in Launceston, Tasmania!
Call for Papers: 2011 Interstices Under Construction Symposium
In Uncategorized on May 8, 2011 at 08:22i
[closed]
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Technics, Memory and the Architecture of History
University of Tasmania
25-27 November
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Key Speakers:
Prof Alessandra Ponte, Université de Montréal, Canada
Prof William Taylor, University of Western Australia
Dr Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
Dr Karen Burns, Monash University
Prof Jeff Malpas, University of Tasmania
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Albrecht Duerer 1514 Melancholia I. Image: Wikimedia
In the light of massive catastrophes – the earthquakes near Sendai and Christchurch, the tsunamis of Acheh and Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans – the question of urban and architectural reconstruction invokes the question of remembering. What is this ‘past’ that we remember and on which we base our future reconstructions? What images of the past do we call upon in our decisions to build or not to build – and how do they negotiate the terrain between memory and history, nature and culture, technology and sustainability, planning and responding, tradition and innovation, foundations and interstices?
To Bernard Stiegler, the image that we recall in / as history is not an “image in general.” Rather it is an image with an irreducible materiality, inscribed in a technical history. That is to say, the image-object of history is given to us; we inherit it and make it our own. History has therefore a technicity and its own historicity: the architecture of its images contains technical traces of their construction.
The task of the historian becomes more complex in the light of such mnemotechnics. In recalling the past, no transcendental signified or image precedes the image-object. The event of memory calls for an imagination that does not separate mental images from image-objects and their associated technics of construction and dissemination.
As Lebbeus Woods says, the inventions and radical reconstructions that make survival possible under extreme, catastrophic conditions provide new ways of living in a paradoxical state of perpetual destruction and construction. Here, the image-object of the past maintains a dynamics of simultaneous political, technological, epistemological and personal change. The practices of architecture, design and art – when treated as images with technicities that produce an artificial already-there of the past that is not lived but imposed – become useful strata to identify and render problematic civic values and democratic processes.
What are some of the key image-objects that architecturalise historiography, particularly the historiographies of architecture, design and art? What are the ontological conditions surrounding these historical image-objects, their construction and dissemination? What alternative topologies of memorialising the past are imaginable: narratival, conversational, oral and gestural? What images are inherited by the historian, and how does the interior (psychic) condition of the historian assimilate (or not) the otherness of the image-objects that arrive from the outside?
Taking seriously the metaphor of the cinematic, the temporalisation of the image-object and its absorption into the sphere of production, and the indeterminacy of images that carry the technics of interhuman relations, the symposium invokes the theatre of the historian’s individuation alongside history’s mnemotechnics that organize the images which appear whenever memory is invoked.
We invite you to contribute to the examination of these and other related issues at the 2011 Interstices Under Construction Symposium. We welcome academics, practitioners and postgraduate students, and to present their investigations in 20 minute papers. The symposium also encourages alternative modes of presentations including cinematic and filmic presentations, installations and drawings. There will be an associated exhibition and film screening as part of the symposium.
Please send a 500 word abstract of your presentation (scholarly paper, drawings, installations, and/or film) to Stephen Loo (stephen.loo@utas.edu.au) by 31 July 2011. ALL ABSTRACTS WILL BE DOUBLE-BLIND REFEREED FOR INCLUSION IN THE SYMPOSIUM. The conference brochure with an abbreviated abstract will be published on this blog (https://intersticesjournal.wordpress.com).
The symposium will be held on 25-27 November 2011, in Launceston, Tasmania, Australia at the School of Architecture & Design, University of Tasmania. Closer to the time, the programme and updates will be available here. The Interstices Under Construction symposium this year will run in conjunction with the Cinema, Theatre, Publics: The future place of social imaginings Colloquium, organized by the School of Visual and Performing Arts, University of Tasmania’s Cinema in Transition Experiment (CITE) on 24-25 November 2011.
The Interstices Under Construction symposium will be followed immediately by a Call for Papers with the same theme, to be published in Issue 13 of Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts in 2012.
We look forward to your contribution!
Call for Paper for Issue 12 of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts
In Uncategorized on November 7, 2010 at 11:24
Unsettled Containers – Aspects of Interiority [1]
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In architecture, as in ecology, equilibrium between inside and outside is rather like paradise, something too good to be true, therefore not good enough.
David Leatherbarrow
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Image based on Leonardo da Vinci: Studies of Embryos, c.1510-13
Is architecture a cult of the externalised object? Only four of 46 images of prize winning entries on the 2009 World Architecture Festival website show interiors. This object-cult and neglect of the interior is symptomatic of architecture’s domination by a polarised nineteenth-century conception of containment. So efficiently are interior and exterior sealed off from each other that they are frequently treated as discrete professional domains.
However, inside and outside are always ready to be reversed – their boundaries full of tension and at points occupied by beings who awaken “two-way dreams” (Bachelard). In Benjamin’s Arcades Project, 19th century petit bourgeois encased themselves in their interior as in a “spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry”. In his dissection of their culture, where the private sphere of the dwelling and public spheres of work and politics are opposites, the interior appears as a counterpart to the global consciousness of empire. European traders and travellers retreated after their worldly adventures into their wallpapered interiors, to “save their souls” (Sloterdijk). However, the sealed world of the 1851 Crystal Palace turned the exterior world into a magic form of immanence – by asserting the values of imperialist capitalism in a spectacular domestication of the globe. Conversely, the Parisian arcades appear as the workers’ living rooms while the apartments of the new boulevards lose the vertical emphasis of old city dwellings and form instead a horizontal march of salons that parallel the thoroughfares, which end at train stations whose networks, in turn, run to the limits of national territory and beckoning colonial horizons beyond.
Today’s spaces can seem more involuted, fragile and unsettled. Phenomenological theories focus on the proximate qualities of architecture and a possible avenue for a new emphasis on the interior. Other approaches highlight different modes of proximity like digital, intimate involvements. The ability to say “we” may be a fundamental condition of space, which creates interior spaces as spheres for dwelling (Sloterdijk). Like immersive plants, they elaborate human existence and embed human relationships. Opposite forces create the climatised hothouses of luxury consumption, relaxation and privileged cosmopolitanism familiar to us today, in which nature and culture are indoor affairs and history and the Other are left outside. Those with purchasing power stage their daydreams on the inside as, on the outside, more or less forgotten majorities try to survive amongst traditions, adaptations, revolutions and improvisations.
How can interiority be conjugated in new ways? How do we draw the lines today? What constitutes interiority? What does it have to say about the institutionalised containment of refugee centres or gated communities or, indeed, the openness of the Pacific? What is it like to negotiate the pae [2] from inside? Where are the spaces of Self and Other? How do global and regional flows circulate in interiors? What does interiority mean in the context of technological forms of life and the ubiquity of cybernetic feedback loops, managerial logistics, probabilistic measures of risk and the highly scripted spaces of transport and circulation that Marc Augé has referred to as ‘non-places’? How are interior immensity and claustrophobia related, and is there a special relationship between interiority and possession? When is a set of walls an interior, when is an object a container, and when is a container a world?
Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts invites you to unsettle the dichotomy of interior and exterior; to redefine and reorient the concept of the interior for the present, and project it towards the future. [3] For the refereed part, we welcome submission of 5000 word papers and visual submissions with an accompanying text of approximately 500 words. For the non-refereed part, we welcome papers up to 2500 words and reviews of up to 1000 words.
Please send your submissions to the co-ordinating editor, Julia Gatley (julia.gatley@auckland.ac.nz), by 28 February 2011. Notes for contributors are available here.
[1] ‘Unsettled containers’ (unruhige Behälter) is a term which the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk probably derived from Gaston Bachelard, who conceived of humans as fundamentally unsettled and half-open beings.
[2] Pae (Māori): a transitional zone of demarcation and negotiation (R. Jahnke, 1999).
[3] Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts received an “A” rating in the 2009 and 2010 Australian Research Council’s Journal Ranking Exercise. See also http://www.2020publication.info/
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You can order current or back issues of Interstices here.
Unsettled Containers: Aspects of Interiority
In Uncategorized on September 16, 2010 at 19:01The University of Auckland, NICAI Conference Centre, 22 Symonds St
Programme
(download brochure here)
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Friday, 8 October 2010
16:00 Opening address:
Professor Jenny Dixon, Dean NICAI, and Rewi Thompson, Architect, School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland
16:30 Professional Panel Interior | Interiority:
With Rick Pearson, Michael Major, Jennifer Walling, Peter Were and Christina Mackay.
Chair: Associate Professor Julieanna Preston, Institute of Design for Industry and Environment, Massey University
18:00 Drinks and Launch of Interstices11: The Traction of Drawing (order a copy here)
18:45 Introduction to Professor David Leatherbarrow:
Dr. Ross Jenner, Associate Head Research, School of Architecture and Planning,
The University of Auckland
19:00 Keynote Disorientation and Disclosure:
David Leatherbarrow, Professor of Architecture and Chair of the Graduate Group in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania School of Design
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Saturday, 9 October 2010
09:00-10:30 Containment | Exposure
Julieanna Preston, Dianne Peacock, Michael Milojevic
11:00-12:30 Interior | World
Suzie Attiwill, Kirsty Volz, Michael Chapman
13:30-15:00 Glass House | Hot House
John Roberts, Sean Sturm and Stephen Turner, Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul
15:30-17:00 Boundary | Control
Sandra Lösche, Christina Mackay, Kara Rosemeier
15:30-17:00 Inside | Out
Tim Adams, Lealiifano Albert Refiti and I’uogafa Tuagalu, Azadeh Emadi
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Sunday, 10 October 2010
10:00-11:30 Representation | Apparatus
Stefanie Sobelle, Judy Cockeram and JudyArx Scribe, Marian Macken
9:30-11:30 Work-in-Progress
Albert Refiti, Ross Jenner, Jacky Bowring
11:30 Concluding remarks: Professor David Leatherbarrow (video in 2 parts)
Part 1:
Part 2:
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Panel discussion and keynote lecture on Friday are open to the public. Registration for the symposium is $150 for the full programme, $50 for each morning or afternoon session. You can register for individual sessions on the day (please pay by cash or cheque).
Free registration for full time students and unwaged people. Register here.
New Zealand Institute of Architects CPD Points are available per morning or afternoon session, for details see NZIA website.
Disorientation and Disclosure
Update: Unsettled Containers: Aspects of Interiority
In Uncategorized on August 12, 2010 at 11:16Getting closer: we have accepted 21 double blind refereed abstracts – have a look here. We are now receiving expressions of interest for Work-in-Progress sessions. If you have something that is not of a finished nature but of interest in this context, and for which you would like to receive feedback, please let us know. You can download the registration form here.
We will start posting programme updates here around the end of September.
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Professor David Leatherbarrow
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David Leatherbarrow’s participation as keynote speaker has been confirmed and we are looking forward to welcoming him here in Aotearoa/New Zealand.
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Green Line Cafe, David Leatherbarrow
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The Call for Papers for Unsettled Containers: Aspects of Interiority (Interstices12) will be published here in early November 2010. Submissions will be due in by early February 2011 for publication in October 2011. Watch this space …
Notes for Contributors are available here. They are updated from time to time so please check for currency before submission.
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Image based on “2001: A Space Odyssey”
(Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
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For more permanent information (overview of previous issues and sample papers to download), please visit our website (www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz). To order online, please go to the MagMag website.
Call for Papers: 2010 Interstices Under Construction Symposium
In Uncategorized on May 18, 2010 at 10:09Unsettled Containers: Aspects of Interiority [1]
The University of Auckland, School of Architecture and Planning
8-10 October 2010
Keynote speaker:
Professor David Leatherbarrow
University of Pennsylvania School of Design
In architecture, as in ecology, equilibrium between inside and outside is rather like paradise, something too good to be true, therefore not good enough. David Leatherbarrow
Image based on Leonardo da Vinci: Studies of Embryos, c.1510-13
Is architecture a cult of the externalised object? It would seem so: of 46 images of prize winning entries on the 2009 World Architecture Festival website, for example, only four show interiors. This object-cult and neglect of the interior is a symptom of architecture’s domination by a polarised nineteenth-century conception of containment. So efficiently are interior and exterior sealed off from each other that they are frequently treated as discrete professional domains.
However, inside and outside are always ready to be reversed – their boundaries full of tension and at points occupied by beings who awaken “two-way dreams” (Bachelard). In Benjamin’s Arcades Project, 19th century petit bourgeois encased themselves in their interior as in a “spider’s web, in whose toils world events hang loosely suspended like so many insect bodies sucked dry”. In his dissection of their culture, where the private sphere of the dwelling and public spheres of work and politics are opposites, the interior appears as a counterpart to the global consciousness of empire. European traders and travellers retreated after their worldly adventures into their wallpapered interiors, to “save their souls” (Sloterdijk). However, the sealed world of the 1851 Crystal Palace turned the exterior world into a magic form of immanence – by asserting the values of imperialist capitalism in a spectacular domestication of the globe. Conversely, the Parisian arcades appear as the workers’ living rooms.
To many, today’s spaces seem more involuted, fragile and unsettled than those of the past. Phenomenological theories of architecture, like those of Pallaasma, Pérez-Gómez, and Leatherbarrow, represent an intense focus on the proximate qualities of architecture, and a possible avenue for a new emphasis on the interior. Other approaches highlight different modes of every-day proximity, such as digital, intimate involvements. Sloterdijk posits the ability to say “we” as the fundamental condition of space, which creates interior spaces as spheres for dwelling. Like immersive plants, these elaborate human existence and embed human relationships – even if this interiority is, from the beginning, touched by an exteriority against which it must assert itself. Opposite forces create the climatised hothouses of luxury consumption, relaxation and privileged cosmopolitanism familiar to us today, in which nature and culture are indoor affairs and history is left outside. Those with purchasing power stage their daydreams on the inside as, on the outside, more or less forgotten majorities try to survive amongst traditions, adaptations, revolutions and improvisations.
How can interiority be conjugated in new ways? If interiority is a way of thinking of ourselves as being-in-the-world, to the exclusion of whatever we fail to integrate, how do we draw the lines and name the territories today? What constitutes interiority? What does it have to say about the institutionalised containment of refugee centres or gated communities; the improvised urbanism of Freetown’s shanties or Brazilian favela; or, indeed, the openness of the Pacific? How are transpositions of space from sacred to common, public to private, mind to body affected by interiority? What is it like to negotiate the pae [2] from inside? Where are the spaces of Self and Other? How do global and regional flows circulate in interiors, and how do we register difference? How are interior immensity and claustrophobia related, and is there a special relationship between interiority and possession? When is a set of walls an interior, when is an object a container, and when is a container a world?
Interstices invites you to unsettle the dichotomy of interior and exterior; to redefine and reorient the concept of the interior for the present, and project it towards the future. We welcome postgraduate students, academics and practitioners to present their investigations in 20 minute papers. Please send a 500 word abstract of your presentation to Tina Engels-Schwarzpaul (tina.engels@aut.ac.nz) by 5 July 2010. Abstracts will be double-blind refereed and, if accepted, published on the Interstices website (www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz).
The symposium will be held on 8-10 October 2010 at the School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland, 22 Symonds St, Auckland. Closer to the time, the programme and updates will be available here. Participants will present their investigations in 20 minute sessions. There will be a workshop session for emerging researchers, independent of the refereeing process, which will focus on developing research capability. In November, the symposium will be followed by a Call for Papers, with the same theme, for issue 12 of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts in 2011.[3]
[1] ‘Unsettled containers’ (unruhige Behälter) is a term which the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk probably derived from Gaston Bachelard, who conceived of humans as fundamentally unsettled and half-open beings.
[2] Pae (Māori): a transitional zone of demarcation and negotiation (R. Jahnke, 1999).
[3] Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts received an “A” rating in the 2009 and 2010 Australian Research Council’s Journal Ranking Exercise.
Guidelines for visual submissions to the refereed part of Interstices
In Uncategorized on February 15, 2010 at 11:19Notes for Contributors
Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts is about the spaces between idea and thing where perfect correspondence is never quite found, demanding a realm of endless negotiation and productive interpretation. We are not there to reaffirm existing normative standards and canons, nor to rest comfortably in the supposed self-sufficiency of the building/art object, regional identity, composition, nature, function … but to explore the interstices, the gaps and fractures within an institution that appears solid, secure and fixed (Jenner, 1991).
In the particular mode of the media and methods used, we therefore expect visual submissions to the refereed part of Interstices to engage in, and contribute to, a wider critical context. Their mode of fabrication, and its exploration and questioning, needs to be evident both in the visual and textual parts of the submission, and their relationship with sites and empirical or conceptual contexts must be articulated and made explicit. The work needs to demonstrate innovation or creative excellence.
Submissions must clearly position the work within the current field of knowledge in architecture, art and design. That is, they must articulate, in both graphic and textual form, the theoretical underpinnings, design process, and reflective evaluation of the outcome. They need to be pertinent to the theme of the issue, demonstrate a critical engagement with current debates and an understanding of the body of knowledge underpinning them, have an appropriate structure, and be accessible to the readers of Interstices. In particular, the relationship between text and visual work needs to be carefully considered and articulated. Images need to be supplied as high quality jpg files (300dpi at high quality compression rate, at approximately 1.5 the size of the anticipated reproduction) and be accompanied by a careful description of the media and processes used. The accompanying text of approximately 500 words needs succinctly to explain context and intention. It needs to reference precedents, which attempted the same or in any other way impacted on the conception of the work submitted. This part should be carefully footnoted using (an adaptation of) the APA Style.
For further information about Issue 11, The Traction Drawing, please refer to previous post.
Please submit your visual contributions by 28 February 2010 to the Co-ordinating Editor, Interstices 11, Rafik Patel <rafik.patel@aut.ac.nz>
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Jenner, R. (1991). Editorial: The Spaces Between. Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts(1), i-ii.
Call for Paper for Issue 11 of Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts
In Uncategorized on December 3, 2009 at 23:31
[closed]
Manus Occulata in Andrea Alciato (1546) Emblematum libellus (inverted)
Why raise the issue of drawing again? With the proliferation and maturation of digital technologies, what is the use of the hand and the traces it makes on clay, stone, wood or paper? This symposium seeks to examine the technologies of drawing – their marks, lines, scratches, furrows, incisions, touches, dots and dashes, inscriptions, string lines, stains and blotches; pencilled, inked, chalked, brushed, illuminated or erased on diverse grounds.
What is made in the acts of drawing comes into being through the sapience of a facture, not through any Cartesian process of mathème. Conceived thus, drawing is wholly based on an intimate knowledge of material manifestations, within which tangible lines become carriers of fluid and invisible links that guide intangible thought.
Pulling in pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territories, one should write and draw with hesitation, discovering the multiple aspects of graphesis, a generative graphic process understood in its slow making. The fruitful vagueness of graphesis comes from the ambiguity embodied in the Latin spell: nullo dies sine linea, where linea (line), a heuristic device, must be understood as a line of writing, as a line in a drawing, or as the pulling of a line on a construction site. Architecture results from their miscegenation: images are written and words are drafted; cultural events and material expressions cross. Graphesis is a course of actions, the factures which actualize future and past.
The quality and selection of the ink’s luminosity, graphite’s fatness, watercolour’s lightness, tempera’s density, the screen’s pixellation, the flexibility or rigidity of supports … readers of the drawings indirectly see and savour them all. They foster “inferences from facture”, an extremely productive procedure. To consider an artefact in terms of its facture is to consider it as a record of its own having been made. Drawings’ signifying power is in the liturgy of their making, which generates an aura that can be intuited by maker and reader simply by casting a glance.
Drawing as tool, technique and technology exteriorises the mind and emotions; it makes present the invisible. Drawing as a forecasting, predictive medium aims at a destination; it has a scope and end, it designates. Projecting, throwing forward orthogonal or oblique lines, it can sever, as in sections and plans. In draughting, as an act of thought, drawing seeks enactment: the making of lines which instruct further making in implementation. Or it translates: from drawing to building and building to drawing. In sketches, outlines, and studies we may pursue an allusive idea through the traction of lines. The formative force of an idea, emanating from the body as from the mind, seeks ever greater precision, often in successive drafts or erasures. Conversely, gestures, traces or tracks of the line can be eventful, punctuate flows like notation in music, or regulate flows like a programme or grammé.
Issue 11 of Interstices: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts will be devoted to the exploration of these issues for which we invite you to submit a paper for consideration.
mm
Submissions:
Please submit your paper by 28 February 2010 to The Co-ordinating Editor, Interstices 11, Rafik Patel <rafik.patel@aut.ac.nz>
Refereed papers must not exceed 5000 words (including endnotes; excluding bibliography), non-refereed full papers 2500 words, and reviews 1000 words (longer papers are only accepted in special circumstances and with prior negotiation). Please check the Notes for Contributors (http://www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz/files/NotesForContributors2009.pdf) for details regarding style, formatting, spelling, etc.
We also invite submission of drawings, which are normally published in the non-refereed part of the journal. However, for this issue we are considering an alternative review process that would allow us to referee visual submissions. Negotiations about this process have just only started and Notes for Contributors are not yet available. We will inform you about progress if you register your interest.
Rafik Patel
School of Art & Design
AUT University, City Campus
WE Building, 27 St Paul St
Auckland 1010
T: +64 9 9219999 extn: 8073
Why raise the issue of drawing again? With the proliferation and maturation of digital technologies, what is the use of the hand and the traces it makes on clay, stone, wood or paper? This symposium seeks to examine the technologies of drawing – their marks, lines, scratches, furrows, incisions, touches, dots and dashes, inscriptions, string lines, stains and blotches; pencilled, inked, chalked, brushed, illuminated or erased on diverse grounds.What is made in the acts of drawing comes into being through the sapience of a facture, not through any Cartesian process of mathème. Conceived thus, drawing is wholly based on an intimate knowledge of material manifestations, within which tangible lines become carriers of fluid and invisible links that guide intangible thought.
Pulling in pieces of geometry, geology, alchemy, philosophy, politics, biography, biology, mythology, and philology from alien territories, one should write and draw with hesitation, discovering the mul-tiple aspects of graphesis, a generative graphic process understood in its slow making. The fruitful vagueness of graphesis comes from the ambiguity embodied in the Latin spell: nullo dies sine linea, where linea (line), a heuristic device, must be understood as a line of writing, as a line in a drawing, or as the pulling of a line on a construction site. Architecture results from their miscegenation: images are written and words are drafted; cultural events and material expressions cross. Graphesis is a course of actions, the factures which actualize future and past.
The quality and selection of the ink’s luminosity, graphite’s fatness, watercolour’s lightness, tempera’s density, the screen’s pixellation, the flexibility or rigidity of supports … readers of the drawings indirectly see and savour them all. They foster “inferences from facture”, an extremely productive procedure. To consider an artefact in terms of its facture is to consider it as a record of its own having been made. Drawings’ signifying power is in the liturgy of their making, which generates an aura that can be intuited by maker and reader simply by casting a glance.
Drawing as tool, technique and technology exteriorises the mind and emotions; it makes present the invisible. Drawing as a forecasting, predictive medium aims at a destination; it has a scope and end, it designates. Projecting, throwing forward orthogonal or oblique lines, it can sever, as in sections and plans. In draughting, as an act of thought, drawing seeks enactment: the making of lines which instruct further making in implementation. Or it translates: from drawing to building and building to drawing. In sketches, outlines, and studies we may pursue an allusive idea through the traction of lines. The formative force of an idea, emanating from the body as from the mind, seeks ever greater precision, often in successive drafts or erasures. Conversely, gestures, traces or tracks of the line can be eventful, punctuate flows like notation in music, or regulate flows like a programme or grammé.
Issue 11 of Interstices 11: A Journal of Architecture and Related Arts will be devoted to the exploration of these issues in which we invite you to submit a paper for consideration.
Submissions:
Please submit your paper by 28 February 2010 to The Co-ordinating Editor, Interstices 11, Rafik Patel rafik.patel@aut.ac.nz
Refereed papers must not exceed 5000 words (including endnotes; excluding bibliography), non-refereed full papers 2500 words, and reviews 1000 words (longer papers are only accepted in special circumstances and with prior negotiation). Please check the Notes for Contributors (http://www.interstices.auckland.ac.nz/files/NotesForContributors2009.pdf) for details regarding style, formatting, spelling, etc.
We also invite submission of drawings, which are normally published in the non-refereed part of the journal. However, for this issue we are considering an alternative review process that would allow us to referee visual submissions. Negotiations about this process have just only started and Notes for Contributors are not yet available. We will inform you about progress if you register your interest.
 |
Rafik PatelSchool of Art & DesignAuckland University of Technology
City Campus WE Building, 27 St Paul St Auckland 1010 T: +64 9 9219999 extn: 8073 Email: rafik.patel@aut.ac.nz |
Interstices: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts 