Feb. 7-9, 2013
Directed by Patrick Haughey and Daves Rossell of the Savannah College of Art and Design's architectural history department
Call for papers
Deadline for submissions: July 15, 2012
The SCAD School of Building Arts' architectural history department is seeking papers investigating modernity and/or modernities in the broadest and most critical terms.
Send one-page abstracts (300 words maximum) and curriculum vitae by email to Patrick Haughey and Daves Rossell, or by mail to:
Savannah College of Art and Design
c/o Department of architectural history
P.O. Box 3146
Savannah, GA 31402-3146
Electronic submissions are preferred.
Suggested symposium topics
Studies addressing any aspect of architecture, landscape or the imagined environment are welcome, as are works that address empirical, methodological or theoretical approaches. The significance of the split-level house in mid-20th-century suburbanization is as relevant to the topic as postcolonial reinterpretations of world architecture.
Investigations of attempts to assert modernity, as suggested by the origins of the very word "modern" deriving from the Latin modernus from modo, "just now," (marking a fifth-century desire to distinguish the Christian era from the Pagan era) are as welcome as discussions of cultural hybridity where modernity is actively negotiated. Studies focusing on particular sites or examples of modern architecture are welcomed, as are interpretations of who determined the modernity, when and where it occurred, and how it was presented and promoted.
Topic examples
- Modern buildings across cultures and times
- Global processes of modernization and their consequences for the built environment
- Modernity as a way of seeing and shaping the world
- Architectural and planning apparatuses of the modern global state
- Ideas of newness in architecture and urbanism
- Anti-historicism in architecture throughout time
- Reactions against aspects of the modern world—local, regional, national and global
- Preservation as a 20th-century modern value
- What does it mean to teach "non-western" topics in a western architecture program, particularly, but not inclusively, 20th- and 21st-century subjects?
- How is the modern architectural canon defined by its classical language?
- Can one even speak of a global modernity without evoking a western ideological framework for knowledge?
- What are the urban and shelter needs of the rapidly expanding global city?
- How do you talk about modernity and urbanism without Asia, Africa or South America?
Schedule, keynote speakers and accommodations will be announced at a later date.
For more information, email architecturalhistory@scad.edu.