Teresa Stoppani
Teresa Stoppani (DrArch IUAV, Architetto IUAV, PhD Arch&UD Florence) is an architect, architectural theorist and critic. She is Professor of Architecture and Director of Architecture and Interior Design at Norwich University of the Arts (UK), and lectures in History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. She has taught architectural design and theory in Italy (IUAV Venice), Australia (UT Sydney, RMIT Melbourne) and the UK (Architectural Association, U Greenwich, U Brighton, Leeds Beckett U where she directed the Leeds School of Architecture).
Teresa’s research interests are the relationship between architecture theory and the design process in the urban environment, and the influence of other spatial and critical practices and of philosophy on the specifically architectural.
Her writings are published internationally in edited books and in academic journals, and include: considerations on G.B. Piranesi’s impossible spaces as an anticipation of the congestion and blurring of boundaries of contemporary urban space (in Footprint, Haecceity Papers, The Journal of Architecture); studies of the city and its processes that draw categories and narratives from other disciplines (books Paradigm Islands and Unorthodox Ways); essays on the grid and the map which reconsider space as apparently measured, ordered and controlled but subject to an intellectual and political project and to new configurations and representations (47 al fondo, Angelaki, ARQ); explorations of the significance of dust in the works of Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, in the visual arts and media, and as a material agent of the undoing of form and a critical tool to explore what remains after the explosion of architecture’s established orders (Idea Journal, Log, The Journal of Architecture); studies on the complex relation of the project of architecture with the destructive events of war and terrorism (Space & Culture, lo Squaderno, Springer Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture).
Her books include Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge 2010) and Unorthodox Ways to Think the City (Routledge 2019) and the co-edited This Thing Called Theory (Routledge 2016).
Teresa is a member of the steering group of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) cofounder of the architecture research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, and executive editor of the AHRA journal Architecture and Culture (Taylor&Francis). Her current project ‘Architecture_Dusts’ explores the undoing of form in architecture, studying its materiality (Dust, Atomised) and minor and aberrant practices (lnvisibles, Monsters).
Teresa’s research interests are the relationship between architecture theory and the design process in the urban environment, and the influence of other spatial and critical practices and of philosophy on the specifically architectural.
Her writings are published internationally in edited books and in academic journals, and include: considerations on G.B. Piranesi’s impossible spaces as an anticipation of the congestion and blurring of boundaries of contemporary urban space (in Footprint, Haecceity Papers, The Journal of Architecture); studies of the city and its processes that draw categories and narratives from other disciplines (books Paradigm Islands and Unorthodox Ways); essays on the grid and the map which reconsider space as apparently measured, ordered and controlled but subject to an intellectual and political project and to new configurations and representations (47 al fondo, Angelaki, ARQ); explorations of the significance of dust in the works of Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, in the visual arts and media, and as a material agent of the undoing of form and a critical tool to explore what remains after the explosion of architecture’s established orders (Idea Journal, Log, The Journal of Architecture); studies on the complex relation of the project of architecture with the destructive events of war and terrorism (Space & Culture, lo Squaderno, Springer Interdisciplinary Handbook of Trauma and Culture).
Her books include Paradigm Islands: Manhattan and Venice (Routledge 2010) and Unorthodox Ways to Think the City (Routledge 2019) and the co-edited This Thing Called Theory (Routledge 2016).
Teresa is a member of the steering group of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA) cofounder of the architecture research collective ThisThingCalledTheory, and executive editor of the AHRA journal Architecture and Culture (Taylor&Francis). Her current project ‘Architecture_Dusts’ explores the undoing of form in architecture, studying its materiality (Dust, Atomised) and minor and aberrant practices (lnvisibles, Monsters).
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Books by Teresa Stoppani
The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity.
The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.
Contents
1. Introduction 2. Paradigm: Notes For a Definition of Architecture as Paradigm 3. Island: The Possibility of the City as an Island 4. Map: From Description to Making 5. Model: from object to process 6. Dust: From Form to Transformation
The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.
Key words: Manhattan. Venice. Urban paradigms. Architecture as a process. Urban diagram. Crisis of modernism.
Includes:
Teresa Stoppani,
‘Mapmakers’, 56-7;
‘The Iquazu Temple’, 110-11;
‘Museum of London. Brief Questions’, 129;
‘Post Scriptum: The Dissected Museum’, 132-133.
Journal by Teresa Stoppani
Edited by Teresa Stoppani.
Includes: Teresa Stoppani, ‘Introduction: Measuring the World’ (13 pages).
Articles by Teresa Stoppani
This essay considers the irruption of the designed destructive event in the order of the project of architecture. The artificial disaster brings onto architecture destructive sudden forces that operate against it with an intensity and speed that are different from those that are at play in it. It imposes on architecture the man-devised, forceful, and violent interference of a project that is alien to that of architecture. The violent orchestrated event in space is interpreted here as a paroxysmal—explicit, sudden, violent—actualization of the forces that contribute to the shaping of the environment. Design and planning are about space-definition and form-making, while the destruction inflicted by the disaster concerns the undoing of form, of planned orders, of structures (be they societal, urban, economic, national). Through a series of examples, this text explores those practices which—in architecture and around architecture—work on and with the energy released by the disastrous event. It aims to understand the effects of the planned disaster on the wider questions that the discipline of architecture needs to ask and suggests that silence—or, the project of silence of architecture—is an act of design too.
The works of sculptors and installation artists Cornelia Parker and Heide Fasnacht question the issue of form by focusing on the explosion as the ‘moment between’ the composed form of the architectural object and the re-composed aggregate form produced by the artwork. "
with their own materials, and constantly redefine themselves in their application to the specific. In this sense they are projects. .... After Koolhaas and Tafuri, is it possible to redefine delirium in the light of the historical project and within it, as a historical work in and of architecture, which becomes proposition? A delirium that defies linearity but also – and mainly – uses ERASURE to unveil (possibilities) rather than delete, to accumulate complexities and re-value and dwell in the detail. This delirium is not that of the erasure
but that of the erased, an open project rather than a closed operative sedated one; delirium not as deviation, or transgression, or censorship, but as placement of a re-examined past within the present. Voices of the delirium thus redefined as open
project can be found in what I call – for the purpose of this argument – the work of the "MULIER DELIRANS", that is, the corpus of discursive practices (and projects) produced in the 1980s and 90s by women architectural theorists. ....
Contents: Con-texts and questions; De-lirium; Historical "project"; Delirium and historical project; Delirium after the historical project: the "mulier delirans"
In George Bataille’s work the active presence of dust allows to “see” an architecture of becoming that questions issues of form definition and signification. A “dusty” approach to architecture’s materiality allows a breaking away from the established ‘architectural straitjacket’ (Bataille), towards a redefinition of form making in architecture as a negotiated and dynamic process.
The paradigm and philosophy, the island and the city, the map and representation, the model and making and the questioning of form performed by dust, are explored beyond their definition, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city and are proposed as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity.
The book analyses how these ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different creative disciplines, beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and traces the role that they have played in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research. What emerges is the idea of an ‘architecture of the city’ that is not only physical but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.
Contents
1. Introduction 2. Paradigm: Notes For a Definition of Architecture as Paradigm 3. Island: The Possibility of the City as an Island 4. Map: From Description to Making 5. Model: from object to process 6. Dust: From Form to Transformation
The sections move gradually from the specifics of architectural thought – its history, theory, and criticism – and their ongoing relation with philosophy, to the critical positions formulated through architecture’s specific forms of expression, and onto more recent forms of architecture’s engagement and self-definition. The book’s thematic sessions are concluded by and interspersed with a series of shorter critical position texts, which, together, propose a new vision of the contemporary role of theory in architecture. What emerges, overall, is a critical and productive role for theory in architecture today: theory as a proposition, theory as task and as a ‘risk’ of architecture.
Key words: Manhattan. Venice. Urban paradigms. Architecture as a process. Urban diagram. Crisis of modernism.
Includes:
Teresa Stoppani,
‘Mapmakers’, 56-7;
‘The Iquazu Temple’, 110-11;
‘Museum of London. Brief Questions’, 129;
‘Post Scriptum: The Dissected Museum’, 132-133.
Edited by Teresa Stoppani.
Includes: Teresa Stoppani, ‘Introduction: Measuring the World’ (13 pages).
This essay considers the irruption of the designed destructive event in the order of the project of architecture. The artificial disaster brings onto architecture destructive sudden forces that operate against it with an intensity and speed that are different from those that are at play in it. It imposes on architecture the man-devised, forceful, and violent interference of a project that is alien to that of architecture. The violent orchestrated event in space is interpreted here as a paroxysmal—explicit, sudden, violent—actualization of the forces that contribute to the shaping of the environment. Design and planning are about space-definition and form-making, while the destruction inflicted by the disaster concerns the undoing of form, of planned orders, of structures (be they societal, urban, economic, national). Through a series of examples, this text explores those practices which—in architecture and around architecture—work on and with the energy released by the disastrous event. It aims to understand the effects of the planned disaster on the wider questions that the discipline of architecture needs to ask and suggests that silence—or, the project of silence of architecture—is an act of design too.
The works of sculptors and installation artists Cornelia Parker and Heide Fasnacht question the issue of form by focusing on the explosion as the ‘moment between’ the composed form of the architectural object and the re-composed aggregate form produced by the artwork. "
with their own materials, and constantly redefine themselves in their application to the specific. In this sense they are projects. .... After Koolhaas and Tafuri, is it possible to redefine delirium in the light of the historical project and within it, as a historical work in and of architecture, which becomes proposition? A delirium that defies linearity but also – and mainly – uses ERASURE to unveil (possibilities) rather than delete, to accumulate complexities and re-value and dwell in the detail. This delirium is not that of the erasure
but that of the erased, an open project rather than a closed operative sedated one; delirium not as deviation, or transgression, or censorship, but as placement of a re-examined past within the present. Voices of the delirium thus redefined as open
project can be found in what I call – for the purpose of this argument – the work of the "MULIER DELIRANS", that is, the corpus of discursive practices (and projects) produced in the 1980s and 90s by women architectural theorists. ....
Contents: Con-texts and questions; De-lirium; Historical "project"; Delirium and historical project; Delirium after the historical project: the "mulier delirans"
In George Bataille’s work the active presence of dust allows to “see” an architecture of becoming that questions issues of form definition and signification. A “dusty” approach to architecture’s materiality allows a breaking away from the established ‘architectural straitjacket’ (Bataille), towards a redefinition of form making in architecture as a negotiated and dynamic process.
Key words: Abstract grid. Urban grid. Territorial grid. Adaptable system. Dynamic masterplanning.
This is an image of an image of a building of a building, of Basilico redoing Piranesi, of Hadrian remaking Agrippa, of a church squatting a temple, of a temple foregrounding a mausoleum. This is an image of time, a photo-archaeology of vertical screens rather than horizontal stratigraphy. ....
As Tafuri realises his “project” per exempla, he repeatedly returns to the urban projects that Le Corbusier had developed for Algiers between 1930 and 1942, exploring in them those “beyond architecture” and ideological constructions that the “project” of critical history had set out to dissect. In instalments, Tafuri shows how Le Corbusier’s persistent engagement with Algiers is emblematic of the modern project’s ambiguous relationship with capitalism and with power. This chapter argues that Tafuri’s work, by returning and differently focusing his attention to the project, cuts deep through the methods of historiography itself, revealing the “unsafe building” of historical analysis and the need to render its project interminable.
~ ~ ~
The volume On Power in Architecture brings together essays and interviews critically analysing the relationships between architecture and power from three philosophical perspectives: materialism, phenomenology, and post-structuralism. Perceptive philosophers, theorists of architecture, and historians reflect on the intersection of power and architecture – discussing specific architectural cases and analysing the topicality of established theoretical concepts in the time of contemporary neo-liberalism.
The featured articles were first presented between 2017 and 2019 in a series of symposia On Power in Architecture at the Museum of Architecture and Design in Ljubljana, supported by the Igor Zabel Association for Culture and Theory and other partners.
The paper challenges several suppositions regarding Architecture, its role and agency. Architecture is considered as intrinsic to socio-political upheaval, as an actor rather than a barometer, as self-reflective (and therefore both autonomous from and dependent on other disciplines), and as a propositional force for the (urban) environment. Ultimately, the paper advocates the specificity of architecture, even (and especially) in its involvement with other disciplines and complex contexts of operation. Contents: ‘Architecture is not late’: political regimes, ideologies and financial systems collapse, while architecture is always late in catching up with the reality in which it operates. But is it? ‘Architecture thinks’: since the origin of western culture, architecture and philosophy have been associated in a system of mutual references. ‘Architecture trans-forms’: recent global events are showing us that architecture is not the seismograph that signals and records external upheavals; architecture is deeply involved with processes of social, political, cultural and financial change. ‘Architecture changes’: collaborative and transformative, architecture is ‘provisionally decisive’, as it again and again proposes critical solutions. ‘Architecture is silent’. ‘Architecture laughs’.
Transposed to architecture, the idea of trauma’s “deferred action” is applied to the time of the architectural project. A series of examples—the aftermath of the events of 9/11, architectural responses to the effects of the war in Sarajevo, and Bernard Tschumi’s theoretical work on architecture and violence—illustrate different ways in which architecture elaborates the trauma to produce not only spatially and temporally situated physical responses, but also transformations of the discipline at large, with a further deferred effect in both time and space.
Text on the work of Belgian artist and architect Lieven De Boeck for the catalogue of the exhibition 'Negation in Art and Architecture. Regarding the relation of the arts to society' (11th June-16th July 2005, at 66 East: Centre for Urban Culture, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, www.66east.org)
About the exhibition: ‘Negation in Art and Architecture’ presents site-specific installations by artists and architects and an analytical study examining dialectics, critique and nothingness. The exhibition examines the relation of art and architecture to society by looking into the contemporary function of negation in the arts. In the exhibition, Belgian artist-architect Lieven De Boeck exhibits a critique of architectural and urban design concepts; Amsterdam-based artist Mark Bain presents tongue-in-cheek, anarchic work which undermines the stability of architecture; Rotterdam-based architect Jasper de Haan creates an environment which exhibits anxiety interwoven with ‘nothingness’. ‘Negation’ is a term that originated in the writings of Hegel and was central to Marx’s dialectics. It has been used to describe modern art’s relation to society (Adorno) and the historic avant-garde’s relation to ‘the institution of art’ (Burger).
Lieven De Boeck's architectural investigations use exact quantities, numbers, precise definitions of words, dimensions and times to cut through architectural typologies and conventions. Reaffirmed and multiplied, dissected and deconstructed, emptied forms and rules offer room to define and liberate new occupations of space. De Boeck’s work on the contemporary art museum operates on the different languages of architecture - norms, definitions, typologies. The drawings question handbooks’ formal regulations for the ‘museum’ through their obliteration, substitution, replacement and misplacement. Dictionary definitions of 'museum' undergo a similar dissection that exposes spaces of
incongruity and contrasts. Finally the type of the ‘museum’ is exploded and penetrated by its context, bringing in what norms, definitions and typologies seem to lack: the individual and the city.
The counterpoint text reads De Boeck's architectural investigations on museum typology against the backdrop of a famous experiment in contemporary art collection and display that, outside architecture but constantly interacting with it, produced a similar critique of the space and the role of the museum. From Art of This Century to Ca' Venier dei Leoni in Venice, Peggy Guggenheim exploded all predefined programmes and formal solutions for the display of contemporary art, opening up the space for the display of art and suspending it between the private/personal and the public/city: On one hand the woman who loved sponsored promoted artists, and constructed an autobiography through artworks that although very personal was never exclusively private. On the other hand a city so historically and culturally loud that it could never be excluded from the space of the collection, and offered for it the best context, apparently perfect and complete and yet vulnerable and perpetually unfinished.
Stoppani, Teresa. ‘The undoing of the museum. The manual, the architect and the millionaire’ (with projects by Lieven De Boeck). In Wouter Davidts (ed.), MIM ¿Museum in Motion? (conference proceedings), Sittard: Museum Het Domein; Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie; Ghent: A&S/books, 2005, 127-140.
ISBN 907207632X
In Theories and History of Architecture (1968), the work of the architectural critic is sternly pictured as a walk on the cutting edge of a tightrope, external accidents notwithstanding. Later, as Tafuri unfolds his definition of the historical project, the construction reveals the discontinuous structure and uneven nature of this work. The windswept tightrope on which the critic is asked to proceed is walked upon through selections and exclusions, returns, simultaneity, lacunae and correspondences, and the line of investigation opens up to complications and multiplications of discontinuous and plural discourses (‘bundles’). Thus unfolded, the task of the historical project is to refrain from segmentation and from the instrumental definition of a figure – solution, form, history, story. Its project remains open, in a continuous re-engagement with the present. The tension between the historical project and the processes it investigates develops a critical method that is capable to transform itself and its own language together with the material it produces and reactivates.
The paper argues that Tafuri’s historical project is more than just “historical”: if this history is inevitably a history of the present, it is embedded in the project. Still at work today, the historical project continues to offer rich possibilities for new lines of research, it becomes not only a method for the production of histories, but also a generator of endless analysis and further projects – be they design, critical, textual. The paper focuses on the developments of some of Tafuri’s key ideas in the corpus of discursive practices and projects produced by the current generation of architectural feminist theorists, and in particular on the notions of ‘delirium’ and ‘linearity’ as they are explored, redefined and appropriated as tools for the critical work in architecture. Delirium here defies the linearity of established critical practices and is also intended beyond the Freudian sense of intentional erasure and censorship to which Tafuri refers: not a delirium that erases but the unveiling of the erased, it accumulates complexities and re-values the detail, placing a re-examined past within the present and thus opening up possibilities for ‘other’ strains of action in architectural criticism.
We have just come out of lockdown, our freedom of movement is strictly limited, our homes have become our offices, schools, in some cases hospitals. We meet online, the ‘place’ of this seminar is my laptop, your tablet, their headphones. We are living in a state of exception, physically, emotionally, pedagogically… And politically? And architecturally?
Starting from the present of the Covid-19 pandemic, regimes of quarantine and new ideas of domesticity, this course will take a longer look into architectural culture, to consider how different ‘states of exception’ affect the architectural and the urban, triggering urgent responses, adaptations, transformations, but also ideas that revolutionize architecture.
Topics: STATES OF EXCEPTION; ISLANDS (AND UTOPIAS); (HETERO)TOPIAS; PRISONERS; NON-PLACES; CAMPS; (VAST) INTERIORS; QUARANTINE; CHEZ MOI.
What happens when architecture is dismantled and questioned, broken beyond a repair that nobody wants to perform anymore, so atomised that it calls for a reinvention of its categories and practices? When the history, the representation, the form, the design of architecture are “broken”, its relationship with nature is finally exposed and its edifice collapsed, it is perhaps time to rethink architecture in different terms.InUnorthodox Ways Iargue that architecture and its processes can be better understood by drawing categories from disciplines that exceed the architectural and the urban, proposing them as unorthodox analytic techniques to decipher contemporary spatial complexity. In this session I will reconsider paradigm (Greek paradèigma, ‘example, exemplar’) as an action and relation word that contains within itself the possibility of variation and movement. As an intellectual operation, paradigm works towards the production of a non-dialectical form of knowledge, which does not aim to achieve the universal and derive principles (rules) from it. I will argue that the architectural project performs in the city the relational operation of the paradigm, producing a form of knowledge that dismisses oppositions and resolutions.
The talk is introduced by the interview 'Unorthodox Analysis' with Jorge Otero-Pailos (Director of Historic Preservation) and Andrew S. Dolkart.
Podcast: https://soundcloud.com/columbiagsapp/sets/historic-preservation-1?mc_cid=0674dbe43a&mc_eid=b301317478
The lines of Piranesi’s etchings manipulate the process of drawing, challenging the conventions of architectural representation and transgressing the rules of the classical languages of architecture. But Piranesi’s work goes beyond this.
While his designs remains mostly confined within the medium of the drawing – traced on paper or engraved in copper – his images produce one of the most important “projects” in the history of architecture, as they redefine the very notion of architectural and urban space at the dawn of modernity.
Piranesi’ etchings do not simply represent spaces that are, nor do they anticipate spaces that are yet to be. They rather envision (both imagining and representing) possible and multiple conceptions of space. Piranesi’s contructions refuse the completeness of form, the delimitation of interiors, the perimetration of plans, thus opening a project of space that is still explored and implemented in contemporary architecture.
That is why it is important to reconsider Piranesi’s etchings today, not as surveys of ancient ruins or creations of fantastic spaces, but as a project of ideas. Piranesi’s work opens the possibility of a new notion of space - open, infinite, changing, smooth, dynamic – which still engages the efforts of contemporary architectural and spatial practices, where pencil and burin are replaced by animation software packages and scripting languages. Reactivating the urban space in a critical dimension, Piranesi explores the spatial and temporal complexity of the ‘difficult complications, alternations, and superpositions’ (Deleuze and Guattari) of the forces that are at work in the space of the city.
The lecture re-examines Piranesi’s critical project on classical architecture and urban space, to suggest that beyond his explicit denunciation of the crisis of classical architectural languages, his work resonates with the current shift towards an architecture of becoming: an architecture beyond form, which works with change and materiality.
The grid, the map, the island, the labyrinth, the interstice, the parasite and the pulverizations of dust can be explored beyond the appearance of their form, as processes that differently make space between architecture and the city. These ‘figures’ have been employed at different times and in different visual disciplines beyond architecture and in relation to changing notions of space, and they have played an important role in the shift towards the dynamic that has taken place in contemporary theory and design research in architecture and the city. What emerges from these consideration is the idea of a city that is not only physical, but is largely defined by the way in which its physical spaces are regulated, lived and perceived, but also imagined and projected.
14th May 2014, 6pm
Ian Kiaer: Tooth House talks series
Henry Moore Institute
74 The Headrow, UK - Leeds LS1 3AH
Abstract: Presenting itself both as object and concept, the model has a multivalent and often ambiguous relation with the ideation, representation and construction of architecture. It is this ambiguity that enables the model to engage with the multiple relations that affect the definition of architecture as a discipline and an edifice. As a prototype, a template or a guide for the production of the architectural edifice, the model both proclaims and obfuscates the point of origin of the project. It anticipates, without prescribing, the architectural object as the unfolding of multiple potentialities. Engaging in the making of architecture a plurality of agents beyond the historical figure of the artifex architect, the model challenges the singular authorship of architecture. As it oscillates between object and concept (and object again), the model engages the production of the architectural project in a dynamic set of references, tensions and variations that continue to involve the viewer/actor/inhabitant. When the model loses this dynamic between transition and translation and presents itself as a resolved object it no longer is a 'model'. The talk will explore such oscillations across a series of architectural examples, and in relation to the intellectual and physical explosion of the architectural model performed in the work of Ian Kiaer.
Extensive book review of the English language edition of Tafuri’s book. It discusses Tafuri’s work on the Renaissance in the context of his historical “project”, and the English language translations and interpretations of Tafuri’s works.
Every "help me" there is a pause and then the younger asks: "Next?", rarely obtaining an answer, since the professor is hurrying ahead with his lecture. This repeated misunderstanding gives a little sudden thrill of suspence at every change of slide, and, in that dozy winter afternoon, it's very appreciated by the small audience scattered through the wide empty space of the main hall. I find this misunderstanding courious because I don't recognize where this comes from. The professor is Italian and he is lecturing in his mother language, in the school where he studied and teached for all his life. It is difficult to say how can a so strange and disturbed communication take place between people who work together since years, sharing the same places and, mostly, the same language.
DEADLINE for abstracts of papers: 4th May 2015
Leeds Beckett University, School of Art, Architecture and Design, Leeds, United Kingdom
19th-21st November 2015
KEYNOTES
Andrew Benjamin, Professor of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the Faculty of Arts at Monash University in Melbourne and Anniversary Chair at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Kingston University in London
Cynthia Davidson, Executive director of the nonprofit Anyone Corporation in New York and editor of ANY (Architecture New York) magazine (1993-2000), the ANY books series (1991-2000), Log (2003-present) and the Writing Architecture book series (1995-present) published with MIT Press
Marco De Michelis, Professor of History of Architecture at the IUAV University in Venice, and Visiting Professor of Architecture at Leeds Beckett University
Mario Carpo, Reyner Banham Professor of Architectural History and Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London
Mark Cousins, Director of History and Theory Studies at the Architectural Association in London, and Guest Professor at South-Eastern University in Nanjing
Sylvia Lavin, Professor of Architecture and Director of Critical Studies and of the MA/PhD programs at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at the University of California Los Angeles
This conference proposes Theory as a form of architectural practice which opposes the instrumentalization of its use. It aims to explore the status of Theory in architecture through an examination of instances in current practice, and invites critical reconsiderations of the role of Theory in architecture, its successes and shortcomings. It seeks to trigger discussions, arguments and polemics around this thing called Theory.
Since the Architectural Humanities Research Association was created twelve years ago to promote and develop research in the architectural humanities, the practices of architecture have transformed and diversified, and so has the relationship between the designs, representations and makings of architecture and their surrounding discourses.
After semiotics, psychoanalysis, deconstruction’s flirt with Derridean philosophy, and Deleuzian redefinitions of folds and diagrams, the impact of the digital in architecture seemed to have vanquished the ‘need’ for architecture to refer to discourses from the humanities. Whilst concerns of the humanities are converging with the sciences, they are also simultaneously diverging and dissipating with notions of network, apparatus and agency. The recent imperative in architecture to withdraw from claims of singular design visions has also been characterised by the gathering of individuated credits and subjecting to commodified distribution in the production of theory.
Today, in an age of extreme specialization and thus far inconceivable intersections of fragmented strands of knowledge, architecture continues to reinvent itself. As architecture reconsiders its status as a discipline in relation to digital technologies, material sciences, biology and environmental transformations, it continues to resort to and introject thoughts and practices developed ‘outside’ architecture. It is indeed the very openness and connectedness of architecture that can offer a line of continuity in the ongoing process of self-definition and reinvention that has always characterized architecture as a practice of the multiple and of the critical. As a discipline that never simply makes physical environments, architecture will continue to act in and through all its intersections with its ‘other’ as a critical and cultural agent.
CALL FOR PAPERS
While architecture’s discourse seemed to have been muted with the shift from the alphabet to the algorithm (Mario Carpo, 2011), it has more recently emerged that even for the digital it is already not only possible but indeed necessary to construct an archaeology (Greg Lynn, 2013), and this has to be both historical and critical. Log’s ‘Stocktaking’ issue (summer 2013) borrowed Reyner Banham 1960’s instrumental opposition of tradition and technology to resume (or restart) a critical discourse on contemporary architectural practices, attempting to relate them to recent and not so recent disciplinary pasts, while the ‘Ways to Be Critical’ proposed by Volume 36 (Archis 2013, no. 2) seems to reduce the issue of criticality to a series of positions of militant criticism.
Beyond the mediatory function of theory (Michael Hays, 2000) and its problematic tag of authorship and authority (Giorgio Agamben, 2002), this conference proposes that theory, far from dead, extinct or rejected, remains crucial to the discipline. In the age of post-digital architecture and digital materiality, This Thing Called Theory aims to explore current practices of theory.
We have identified three main areas for discussion and argumentation in THIS THING CALLED THEORY:
THOUGHT
Theory as Criticism
Theory as Architecture
Theory as History
ACTION
Theory as Politics
Theory as Praxis
Theory as Material
SPECULATION
Theory as Utopia
Theory as Science
Theory as Media
We invite individual and group proposals for 20 minute papers and full sessions from architectural historians, theorists, designers and practitioners, as well as those working on the issues identified in the synopsis from other disciplines, including film-making, art practice and performance. Please indicate clearly if submitting a full session panel proposal.
We welcome proposals of papers with the intention or possibility to be supported by or delivered through performance-, installation- or film-based presentation.
We welcome contributions that explore contemporary developments and project future trends, as well as those that offer retrospective theoretical and critical interrogations.
Please send a 500 word abstract, including title, and a 50 word biographical note to
T.Stoppani@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
and
D.Bernath@leedsbeckett.ac.uk
Deadline for abstracts of papers: 4th May 2015
Received abstracts will be blind peer reviewed and we expect to announce decisions by the end of June 2015.
Please note that full papers will be required prior to the conference for panel chairs and to begin the editorial process for publication in the This Thing Called Theory volume of the Routledge ‘Critiques’ series, and for a special conference issue of Architecture and Culture, the AHRA journal.
CONFERENCE
Thursday 19th - Saturday 21st November 2015
VENUES
Rose Bowl Building, City Campus, Leeds Beckett University, and other venues in Leeds (UK) city centre.
WEBSITE
http://www.thisthingcalledtheory.org/
http://cagd.co.uk/public/research/design_and_creativity.php
CONFERENCE COMMITTEE
Professor Teresa Stoppani, Head of The Leeds School of Architecture, Leeds Beckett University
Dr Doreen Bernath, Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Leader of the BA Architectural Studies course, Leeds Beckett University
Braden Engel, Undergraduate History and Theory Coordinator, Academy of Art University, San Francisco and PhD Candidate, Leeds Beckett University
George Themistocleous, Part Time Lecturer and PhD Candidate, Leeds Beckett University
Giorgio Ponzo, Part Time Lecturer and PhD Candidate, Leeds Beckett University
Friday 30th January 2015,
Faculty of Arts, Environment and Technology, Leeds Beckett University, Broadcasting Place, Humanities Building
Leeds, UK
INFO
http://cagd.co.uk/public/research/design_and_creativity.php
http://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/faculties/faculty-of-arts-environment-and-technology/
DESIGN AND CREATIVITY
In his etymological essay on “design” Vilem Flusser observes that the current use of the term ‘indicates just about any situation in which art and technique (including evaluative and scientific thought) combine forces to smooth the way to a new culture’. Design is thus opened up in a wider sense that bridges across art, science and technology. Echoing the words of Flusser’s essay the Design and Creativity research student symposium will aim ‘to bring to light the crafty and insidious aspects of the word “design”’ within the diverse disciplines that operate within the Faculty of Arts, Environment and Technology.
AET research students are invited to critically address the theme of ‘Design and Creativity’ within the context of its current debate and topical role across the faculty disciplines at large. The purpose of the symposium is to offer a window on student research in the Faculty across the different cultures of the arts, humanities, science and technology, and to provoke interdisciplinary conversations on a topical theme we all address, in different ways, in our work.
VENUE & TRAVEL
Leeds Beckett University City Campus, Broadcasting Place, Humanities Building (Building A), Leeds, United Kingdom LS1 3HE
Campus Maps and Guide:
http://www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/about-our-university/contact-and-find-us/
REGISTER
The event is free but places are limited; prebook your place by emailing Beverley Swinburne,
E: B.Swinburne@leedsbeckett.ac.uk