Division of Education, Arts and Social Sciences
Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design
Louis Laybourne Smith School of Architecture and Design
The theme is aimed to capture research on the way history, and
architectural and urban history in particular, is not a petrified single
space, but can be seen as a contested terrain of various regimes of
seeing. While the scopic regimes of modernity are based on the hegemony
of Cartesian perspectivalism, there are other models that contend the
dominant tradition including the baroque, phenomenal and eschatological.
The overall theme relates to how the historical and theoretical
conditions of architecture, urban design, and public space, may be
reworked in the light of the changing landscapes of contemporary social,
cultural and political relations.
The 2007 conference will be organised to contain a range smaller and
diverse themes that reflect current research directions and strengths of
SAHANZ and its affiliated communities, under the overarching theme of
Panorama to Paradise. We envisage each theme containing 8 to 9 related
papers which will lead to more engaged discussions during the conference
and future mini-publications stemming from the general conference
proceedings. Not all papers will be organised into themes at the
conference as there will be sessions with open themes.
The relationship between historical assessment and the preservation
of extant works of architect and precincts is often regarded as close.
What are the bonds and limitations between the work of architectural
historians and the tasks of identifying and protecting historical
works/precincts? Has the proliferation of historiographical perspectives
since the 1970s engendered parallel demand upon heritage policy analysts
and architects, and what of the disproportionate stock of protected 20th
century works? The session invites broad based reflections or case
studies.
Many accounts of modernism have highlighted the domestic over the
public realm. This session proposes to re-address this interpretation by
examining public architecture, building types and landscapes between
1920 and 1970. Papers can investigate particular case-studies or broader
historical / theoretical themes relating to the design, procurement, and
reception of consciously modern public places. Emphasis will be placed
on Australian and New Zealand, but other international contexts that
have relevance to antipodean work will also be welcomed.
As life (and its limit condition, death) as we understand it are
altered by developments in speculative capitalism, the fear of terror
and the reconfiguration of democratic citizenship, and bio- and nano-technologies,
architecture and design are no longer straightforwardly the material
containers of life, but are immanent to the definition of life. This
session invites papers that speculate on how architecture and design
emerge in the light of contemporary social, political and ethical forms.
Architectural practice has consistently allowed for imaginative
speculation on how the world might be otherwise formed. The architecture
of visionary practice, from Piranesi to Woods, has maintained a strong
critical role as the eloquent alternative to the everyday. With the
advent of new digital media in the last twenty years, the very idea of
the avant-garde in architecture has become coupled with its
utopian/dystopian properties. Papers are called for that critically
examine the idea of the representative turn in architecture.
Travel is receiving increasing attention as a theoretical tool to
explore the effects of cultural encounters on social environments. In
anthropology, literary criticism, (post)colonial studies, world history,
and recently architectural historiography, travel is further employed to
interpret concomitant notions of identity, hybridity or desire. The
history of Austral-Asia is contiguous with a rich history of travel, not
least, exploration, (im)migration, exile or tourism. Acknowledging
disparate motives for travel, this session welcomes papers that engage a
travel paradigm to explore the dynamics of cultural exchange, which
continue to shape the built environment in Austral-Asia, and the scopic
regimes that often determine this process.
Scheherazade told never ending stories to save her life and the lives
of others. Her finitude was dependent upon the infinite horizon of
production. A landscape here is a form of inscribing within given codes,
be they historical, theoretical, economic or social/cultural, and as
such implicates spatial/temporal realms. This session investigates
landscapes of production as non-oppositional practice, as that which
sets up other ways of producing the world. It produces unimaginable
places, those that have not yet been thought.
This session studies the extent of the influence of the Japanese
avant-garde on Australasian architects in the post-World War 2 period.
Various building typologies provide fertile ground for analysis of the
growing and changing fascination with Japanese architecture and its
impact on Australian and New Zealand architecture: buildings built Japan
by Australasian architects; buildings built in Australia by Japanese
architects; embassy buildings in Canberra, Wellington & Tokyo;
Australasian buildings by local architects informed by reading about or
visiting Japan.
In seeking to see interiority, a typical response invokes the
domestic condition and its (dis)contents, and often its intentions of
comfort, security, intimacy and well-being. This session explores the
broader domains of interior practices that are neither utopian nor
humble. What is it that the interior archives, whether in the official
archive or in the archive of the great ungathered? The session invites
proposals outside familiar representations of interiority, with
particular attention to the political, imperceptible, the immemorial and
the transforming.
The open session is intended to present papers that are distinguished
by the uniqueness of the subject matter and mode of delivery. Papers are
sought that will challenge the notion of academic research and its
documentation.
Abstracts can be submitted through the
Authors and Abstracts page.
