Fantastic Encounters: Architecture’s One-way Exchange between Past and Future Worlds
As Vincent Scully wrote in 1996, “‘When you wish upon a star your dream comes true’ makes a lovely fiction for a while, especially when it is sung in front of Cinderella Castle with the magic animals capering about, but it is, after all, pure bullshit in the long run. When you wish upon a star you die like everybody else.”
During the 20th century, intense architectural speculation imagined a myriad of new worlds as encounters with other times, people and places, often drawing heavily on received notions about the past and future. From the nostalgic confections of theme parks to the futuristic fantasies of walking cities and one-mile-high skyscrapers, architects have long played a central role in such inventive world-building.
In the context of the fantastic architectural encounter, this session welcomes papers that examine built and unbuilt proposals which projected new architectures based upon imagined cultural intersections, encounters and exchanges: the strange and often hybrid structures that appropriated ideas and images from other cultures or imagined past and future worlds, recombined at will. Papers are encouraged to interpret the topic broadly, but focus on tangible case studies to address questions such as: In what ways were architects playing ‘fast and loose’ with history in service of the future? How were these operations intended as a form of cultural trade or exchange? And to what extent did such visions became vectors of imposition or appropriation?
Session Convernors
Ashley Paine, ATCH Research Centre, School of Architecture, University of Queensland
Joss Kiely, DAAP, University of Cincinnati
Submission Guidelines
Abstratcs must be submitted by 02 August 2019 via email to a.paine@uq.edu.au
Key Dates
Abstract submission: 02 August 2019
Conference: 03-06 December 2019
About AAANZ Conference 2019
Ngā Tūtaki – Encounter/s: Agency, Embodiment, Exchange, Ecologies
An unexpected meeting or a purposeful exchange? What is gained and what is lost? How do we understand encounter/s in 2019?
For some, encounters manifest as social, cultural and global provocations, whilst for others, encounters represent the history of exchange and colonial settlement.
Recent events, both locally and globally, have highlighted the urgency for wider conversations regarding encounter. For this year’s conference we encourage presentations that re-consider disciplinary boundaries in order to counter dominant narratives, and offer decolonising strategies and alternative viewpoints within the arts and cultural sectors. In this way, encounters have the power to be transformative.
The 2019 AAANZ conference will take place at the University of Auckland.
Themes
The conference will have four major themes:
- Agency
- Embodiment
- Exchange
- Ecologies
The themes are deliberately non-prescriptive to allow for multiple readings and understandings and there will be an additional open stream for papers.
The dynamics of Agency are contextual, and are often influenced by hierarchies that determine who speaks and when, whose voices are heard, listened to and valued, and which histories are written and passed on. Embodiment explores how a diversity of cultural traditions and historical encounters are written into and onto the body. In this sense encounters are embodied with the body potentially becoming a battleground for contesting normative, gendered and colonial models of what a body is, or can be. Exchange often describes the art of giving one thing and receiving another, sometimes at the expense of balances in power, gender, and mātauranga/knowledges. Ecologies are characterised by relationships within complex networks of natural, social and cultural systems. The cultural properties of land are determined by the specifics of worldviews that produce ways of engaging with and caring for the environment. In what ways can whenua/landscape be considered as medium rather than genre, and can be used as a stimulant for conversations about ecological crises?