Enfilade

From Brill’s latest Art and Architecture Catalog:

Brill’s Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets is a peer-reviewed book series dedicated to original scholarship on the social, cultural, and economic mechanisms underlying the circulation of art. Over the last two decades interest in the formation, display, and dissolution of art collections increased tremendously; art markets, trade routes, and dealer networks became a rich field of interdisciplinary inquiry. Scholarship brought forth a lot of information about the flamboyant personalities to whom the possession of art was a lifestyle; regarding the ‘social life of things’, i.e. the provenance of individual artworks, many research gaps could be closed.

This shift in scholarly attention from the production side to the consumption side of the art world is also reflected in the emergence of specialized post-graduate courses offered by a number of institutions internationally, as well as an ever-increasing stream of exhibitions, conferences, and publications devoted to the subject. Brill’s book series accommodates scholarly monographs, collections of essays, conference proceedings, and works of reference that engage in the broadly defined topic of art markets and collecting practices throughout history.

We invite scholars to submit their English language manuscript proposal for the new book series to Liesbeth Hugenholtz, Acquisitions Editor Art at Brill (hugenholtz@brill.com) or to the series editor Christian Huemer
(chuemer@getty.edu).

Editor-in-Chief
Christian Huemer, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

Editorial Board
Malcolm Baker (University of California, Riverside),
Ursula Frohne (University of Cologne), Hans van Miegroet (Duke
University, Durham), Inge Reist (Frick Collection, New York), Adriana
Turpin (Institut d’Études Supérieures des Arts, London), Filip Vermeylen
(Erasmus University, Rotterdam)

From the Call for Papers:

Travel and the Country House: Places, Cultures, and Practices
University of Northampton, 15–16 September 2014

Proposals due by 19 May 2014

Keynote speakers include Roey Sweet (University of Leicester) and Margot Finn (UCL).

Travel has long played a vital role in shaping the country house, opening up horizons and exposing both house and owner to a variety of external influences. Travel impacted upon values, tastes, material culture and money, and helped to articulate the flow of ideas, information, goods and capital. The importance of the Grand Tour and Empire to the country house has long been recognised, but domestic tourism and travel for more mundane purposes—to visit family or friends, engage in political life or go to town—were also significant. In this conference, we wish to explore a wide range of travel experiences and consider how these impacted on the country house. How were travel choices made and how were impacts articulated? How did new influences mesh with existing tastes and goods? What impact did its status as a place to visit have upon the country house? And how do we communicate the importance of travel to those visiting country houses today?

We invite papers on all aspects of travel and the country house, but would especially welcome those which focus on:
• Geographies of travel: the Grand Tour, colonies and empire, and domestic and everyday travel
• The view from abroad: foreign visitors to British country houses
• Royal progresses and prodigy houses
• Travelling for business and pleasure: court and parliament; tours and spas
• Travel and material culture: how different places were brought into the country house through objects
• Travel and taste: the impact of travel on architecture, collecting, design and
• Visiting the country house: receiving guests and staying with friends or family
• The practicalities of travel: stables, coaches and horses; trains, ships and boats; servants and guides; accommodation, meals and sleeping
• Travel and publishing: journals, guidebooks and maps
• Travel as a theme in country house interpretation/presentation today

If you would like to present a paper, then please send a 300 word abstract to Prof Jon Stobart: jon.stobart@northampton.ac.uk by 19th May 2014.

As noted at The University of York’s British Art Research:

Fashion, Function and Ornament: Accessorising the Long Eighteenth Century
York Hilton Hotel and Fairfax House, York, 19 September 2014

Proposals due by 28 July 2014

In fashion the term ‘accessory’ covers a wide range of items such as gloves, sashes, reticules, spectacles, watches, parasols, and potentially many other articles. Accessories can be seen as marginal to the nature of fashion, but historically they have played a key role in shaping the character of men’s and women’s fashions, combining ornament and function and giving scope for the expression of individual and collective identities. The era from the late Stuart to the early Victorian period saw the accessory achieve new prominence as a fashion statement, an expression of wealth, status and taste, and a desirable object of consumption, possession and display.

This symposium aims to bring together interested parties from curatorial, conservation, academic and other backgrounds with an interest in fashion, textiles, clothing and related topics to explore the nature and significance of accessories in the history of fashion from c.1660 to c.1840. Relevant topics to be addressed in contributions to the symposium may include (but would certainly not be limited to) the gender, class and identity dimensions of the accessory, collecting and collections cultures of consumerism and consumption, style, fashion and ornament, exoticism and the antique in accessory design and ornament, and the accessory in the visual and literary culture of the ‘long eighteenth century’.

Proposals are invited for symposium contributions not exceeding 20 minutes in length. Please send outlines of c.200 words to fairfaxhousesymposium@gmail.com by Monday 28 July 2014. Please direct any queries about the symposium to the same email address.

Made People: The Beauty of the Body in Art and Cosmetics—An Academic Workshop in Two Parts

Made People I: Make-up
Freie Universität Berlin, 26–27 June 2015
Made People II: Makeover
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz,Max-Planck-Institut, 20–21 November 2015

Proposals due by 31 July 2014

Since antiquity, beauty has been regarded as a work of art in which nature plays a role not so much as a holistic model and ideal but as a basic substance and an ‘assembly kit’. This concept of composite beauty bears the reservation that beauty as an entity only exists in an incomplete form in nature. It suggests that work can be performed on the human body, both to improve and to correct it. The initial hypothesis is that such work represents a concept combining artistic, cosmetic and medical practices that sees the techniques of art in a fundamental field of tension vis-à-vis the substances provided by nature.

Even more than in painting and sculpting, both of which pursued a demonstration of their autonomy and perfection in estheticizing nature in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, a supposed inadequacy of what nature had to offer became a lasting point of friction and even the sole legitimisation in the practice of putting on make-up or doing one’s hair and in more recent beauty surgery. While the impression of naturalness remained virulent as a measurement and an ideal, as it also  does in art that continuous to pursue imitatio, the boundary to reality simultaneously became permeable, so that beauty could literally assume the role of a second nature and the stylist could turn into an alter deus.

Designed as an interdisciplinary event, the workshop explores the norms and techniques of such an estheticizing treatment of nature in the fields of art, cosmetics and plastic surgery regarding physical beauty and the instruments and guiding principles of its creation or enhancement. In two sessions, it traces the various degrees of cosmetic and artistic treatment of and intervention in the natural body from antiquity to the present, examining its superficial make-up on the one hand and its far-reaching makeover on the other. Here, special attention is given to the techniques of estheticization, the processes of selection and synthesis as well as the modification or modelling of parts of the body with respect to both colours and shapes. Such a focus also allows for a demonstration of the violent side that the ideal of beauty bears which ultimately always entails changes to nature, a dissection of the body into beautiful individual parts and their chimera-like reassembling.

The aim of the workshop is to promote academic exchange between junior scholars and established experts. Also, with the aid of a selection of source texts and a common discussion of selected museum exhibits on site, a common thematic basis is to be developed that covers beautifying techniques of make-up and makeover and reaches beyond individual specialisation.

Junior scholars from all disciplines are invited to hand in proposals for twenty-minute contributions in German or English on the presentations and design of physical beauty between nature and art and cosmetics and medicine. Abstracts not exceeding 500 words and a brief CV are to be submitted to workshop@gemachtemenschen.net by July 31, 2014. Travel and accommodation expenses will be covered if applications for funding are accepted.

Organization
Dr. Romana Filzmoser, Universität Salzburg
Prof. Dr. Wolf-Dietrich Löhr, Freie Universität Berlin/Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, Max-Planck-Institut
Julia Saviello M. A., Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München

Art History: The Formation of the Academic Discipline
Rethymnon, Greece, 3–4 October 2014

Proposals due by 30 June 2014

The Association of Greek Art Historians and the Institute for Mediterranean Studies (FORTH) organise an Academic Forum with the title Art History: The Formation of the Academic Discipline in Europe and Related Developments in Greece (18th–19th Centuries). The meeting will take place at the Institute’s premises in Rethymnon, Crete on Friday, 3rd and Saturday, 4th October 2014. The aim of this meeting is to explore the ways in which the academic and research fields of Art History were formed from the late 18th century and continued to develop up to the beginning of the 20th century. Shaped by its interactions with other disciplines, Art History eventually created its own unique discursive field and distinct methodology. With this meeting we also hope to chart the status of historiographical research in Greece, but also worldwide.

We invite papers that focus on, but are not limited to, the following topics: (more…)

From the Understanding British Portraits website:

Understanding British Portraits Annual Seminar 2014
National Portrait Gallery, London, 26 November 2014

Proposals due by 13 June 2014

Mrs Henchman by Daniel Gardner (?1750-1805), drawing and watercolour © Bristol Musuem & Art Gallery

The ‘Understanding British Portraits’ Annual Seminar aims to highlight current scholarly research, museum-based learning programmes, conservation discoveries and curatorial practice relating to British portraits of all media and time periods. This year’s Annual Seminar will be held at the National Portrait Gallery, London, on Wednesday 26 November.

We invite proposals for 20/25 minute-papers from professionals who would like to share case studies and ideas which relate to the aims of the seminar as given above. Please send an outline of approximately 200 words, along with a brief biographical note, to mail@britishportraits.org.uk before Friday 13 June. Those who have submitted papers for consideration in the past are very welcome to do so again this year.

Understanding British Portraits is an active network with free membership for professionals working with British portraits including curators, museum learning professionals, researchers, academics and conservators. They aim to enhance the knowledge and understanding of portraits in all
media in British collections, for the benefit of future research,
exhibitions, interpretation, display and learning programmes.

From the Call for Papers:

L’architecture des ingénieurs, 1650–1850
Galerie Colbert, Paris, 8 November 2014

Proposals due by 15 May 2014

Jacques-Pierre-Jean Rousseau, ingénieur des ponts et chaussées, puis architecte de la ville d’Amiens, reliefs de la façade du théâtre de la ville, 1778, Archives départementales de la Somme

Organisée par les universités Bordeaux III, Paris-Sorbonne, Paris-Ouest, avec le concours du GHAMU

Les années 1980 furent propices à l’étude du travail des ingénieurs : en 1981, Anne Blanchard publiait un Dictionnaire des ingénieurs militaires actifs en France entre 1691 et 1791, témoignant par son volume de l’importance de leur activité, tandis qu’en 1988, Antoine Picon, dans son ouvrage Architectes et ingénieurs au siècle des Lumières, accordait enfin aux ingénieurs des Ponts l’attention qu’ils méritaient et examinait leur formation et leurs méthodes de travail au regard de celles des architectes de l’Académie royale d’architecture.

Au-delà des programmes attendus, fortifications, ouvrages hydrauliques, ponts et routes, les ingénieurs, militaires et des Ponts et Chaussées, honorèrent des commandes dans le domaine de l’architecture publique monumentale, de l’architecture religieuse et hospitalière, mais aussi dans celui de l’architecture domestique et de l’art des jardins.

L’historiographie fait la part belle aux architectes dans les embellissements de la capitale, tandis que les études récentes sur la province accordent aux ingénieurs une place de plus en plus importante : le tableau est en réalité bien plus nuancé. Cette journée sera l’occasion de présenter les limites de cette opposition et d’initier un travail systématique sur l’activité des ingénieurs du règne de Louis XIV à la monarchie de Juillet.

Pour cette première rencontre sont attendues plus spécialement les communications portant sur l’architecture privée et son décor, la distribution et le projet urbain.
Une deuxième rencontre se déroulera en 2015.

Direction scientifique : Basile Baudez, maître de conférences, Paris IV, Alexia Lebeurre, maître de conférences, Bordeaux III, et Dominique Massounie, maître de conférences, Paris Ouest-Nanterre.
Propositions à transmettre avant le 15 mai 2014 : alexialebeurre@aliceadsl.fr, basile.baudez@gmail.com, dommassounie@aol.com

Here’s the description for the HECAA-sponsored, 90-minute session—chaired by Andria Derstine and Rena Hoisington—on the legacy of Donald Posner:

103rd Annual Conference of the College Art Association
New York, 11–14 February 2015

Proposals due by 9 May 2014

The 2015 Call for Participation for the 103rd Annual Conference, taking place February 11–14 in New York, describes many of next year’s sessions. CAA and the session chairs invite your participation: please follow the instructions in the booklet to submit a proposal for a paper or presentation. This publication also includes a call for Poster Session proposals.

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Donald Posner and the Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century French and Italian Art
Andria Derstine, Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College; Rena M. Hoisington, Baltimore Museum of Art, Andria.Derstine@oberlin.edu and RHoisington@artbma.org

Donald Posner (1931–2005), the Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor of Fine Arts at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, was one of a select group of art historians who, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, significantly advanced scholarly inquiry into the Italian and French Baroque. From his first published article, on Le Brun’s Triumphs of Alexander series (1959), to his work on Annibale Carracci, Caravaggio, Domenichino, Lanfranco, Callot, and Poussin, his work helped to initiate and direct future research in the field. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he began to turn his attention toward the eighteenth century—then a notably understudied area. His publications on Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher, Tiepolo, Rigaud, and Nattier set standards for art historical scholarship and greatly contributed to the burgeoning interest in this ‘new’ century. As wide-ranging as the topics he took up was his critical method, encompassing connoisseurship, patronage and collecting, iconography, stylistic issues, taste, and aesthetics, among others. Posner promoted and encouraged research and publication over the course of his long career, and served CAA as Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin from 1968 to 1971 and as Chairman of The Art Bulletin Editorial Board from 1991 to 1994. Ten years after his death, this panel celebrates Posner’s rich legacy by inviting papers that take up particular areas of his field of inquiry and present new information, or that are stimulated by his scholarship and relate to his broad interests.

Descriptions for additional sessions are available here»

© National Trust Images / David Noton / Croome Park / Worcestershire
From the Capability Brown Tercentenary website

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From The Garden History Society:

‘Capability’ Brown: Perception and Response in a Global Context
University of Bath, 9–11 September 2016

Proposals due by 31 August 2014

An ICOMOS-UK International Conference in collaboration with the University of Bath, in association with the Garden History Society and the National Trust, and supported by the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee on Cultural Landscapes.

The landscape designer Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–1783) changed the face of 18th-century England. Yet Brown left no written explanation of his work. Much must be inferred from his surviving landscapes and by seeing his work in the wider context of the naturalistic style that developed in Europe and in countries influenced by Europe. In 2016 the tercentenary of his birth is being celebrated as an opportunity to reflect on his life, work, style and significance.

This international conference, organised by the ICOMOS-UK Cultural Landscapes and Historic Gardens Committee in collaboration with the University of Bath, will be one of the major events in the Capability Brown Tercentenary year. Internationally renowned researchers and practitioners will present Brown’s work in a global context and explore the ways in which it has been interpreted over the last 250 years. The papers will be published in Garden History. With partners including the Garden History Society and the National Trust, this conference will be one of the highlights of the first-ever ‘Capability’ Brown Birthday and Festival, bringing together in a national campaign a huge range of events, openings, exhibitions and publications.

More information is available on the full Call for Papers»

From the SAH 2015 Call for Papers:

2015 Society of Architectural Historians Annual Conference
Chicago, 15–19 April 2015

Proposals due by 6 June 2014

The Society of Architectural Historians is now accepting abstracts for its 68th Annual Conference in Chicago, April 15–19, 2015. Please submit abstracts no later than June 6, 2014, for one of the 32 thematic sessions or for an open session. Sessions have been selected to cover topics across all time periods and architectural styles. SAH encourages submissions from architectural, landscape, and urban historians; museum curators; preservationists; independent scholars; architects; and members of partner organizations.

Thematic sessions are listed below. Open sessions are available for those whose research does not match any of the themed sessions. Instructions and deadlines for submitting to themed sessions and open sessions are the same. Only one abstract per author or co-author may be submitted.

SAH is using an online abstract submission process—please do not send your abstract to the session chair’s email address as this will delay the review of your abstract or possibly void your submission.

Submit Your Abstract Online

View Submission Instructions

Abstract submissions must follow these guidelines:
• Abstracts must be under 300 words
• The title cannot exceed 65 characters, including spaces and punctuation
• Abstracts must follow the Chicago Manual of Style

If submitting to a thematic session, send your CV to the appropriate session chair and the SAH office
at info@sah.org. If submitting to the open session, send your CV to the SAH office only, at info@sah.org. 
Abstracts should define the subject and summarize the argument to be presented in the proposed paper. The content of that paper should be the product of well-documented original research that is primarily analytical and interpretative rather than descriptive in nature. Papers cannot have been previously published or presented in public except to a small, local audience. All abstracts will be held in confidence during the review and selection process, and only the session chair and General Chair will have access to them. 
All session chairs have the prerogative to recommend changes to the abstract in order to ensure it addresses the session theme, and to suggest editorial revisions to a paper in order to make it satisfy session guidelines. It is the responsibility of the session chairs to inform speakers of those guidelines, as well as of the general expectations for participation in the session and the Annual Conference. Session chairs reserve the right to withhold a paper from the program if the author has not complied with those guidelines.

Please note: each speaker is expected to fund his or her own travel and expenses to Chicago. SAH has a limited number of partialfellowships for which Annual Conference speakers may apply. However, SAH’s funding is not sufficient to support the expenses of all speakers. Each speaker and session chair must register and establish membership in SAH for 2015 by August 30, 2014, to show their commitment for the 2015 conference and are required to pay a non-refundable fee equal to that of the conference registration fee.

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A selection of panels that might be relevant for eighteenth-century scholars:

ANCIENTS AND MODERNS: THE UNRAVELING OF ANTIQUITY

The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns erupted in late seventeenth-century France. Although ostensibly concerned with the relative merits of the literary and cultural achievements of modernity and antiquity, the quarrel was predicated upon more ideologically charged issues, and as such what initially began as a literary quarrel quickly developed into a broader debate that impinged upon an array of subjects including architecture. Indeed, the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns unleashed a discourse pitting the sanctity of antiquity against the exigencies of modernity that would shape views of the architecture of both the past and present throughout the long eighteenth century.

As they grappled with questions of imitation and invention, authority and novelty, progress and perfection, and rules and genius, architects turned to the ruins of antiquity to redefine the architecture of the present. The interpretive space that existed between the ruin and its reconstruction, the fragment and the whole, gave rise to differing and vigorously contested visions of antiquity and its relevance for the modern world. The resulting expansion of knowledge led architects to question the prevailing holistic view of antiquity and the assumptions upon which it was based.

This session seeks to explore how the quarrel’s unraveling of the past influenced architectural theory and practice in the present and to understand it as a pan-European phenomenon. We invite papers that reconsider the quarrel and its architectural legacy over the course of the long eighteenth century (1670–1815) throughout Europe. Papers may address architecture as it relates to a range of issues, including the nature of authority, the possibility of progress, the status of the architect, the role of genius, and the relationship between socio-cultural change and the built environment.

Session chairs: John Pinto, Princeton University pinto@princeton.edu; Daniel McReynolds, Princeton University, dmcreyno@princeton.edu

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ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIES OF DATA

In the so-called digital age, ‘data’ is repeatedly presented as the primary unit of knowledge. Yet we know almost nothing of this epistemic unit’s history. How did we come to imagine data as untethered, immaterial bits of information? Historians of the early modern period have written compelling histories of the modern ‘fact’ by exposing its unexpected ties to preternatural monsters and double-entry bookkeeping. What would equivalent histories of data look like? Architectural historians may be particularly well positioned to excavate histories of data since space is a central paradox in our understanding of this unit: while data needs to be infinitely addressable, we assume that it does not occupy an address in space. The sixteenth- century scholar who decided to record his bibliographies not in bound volumes but on slips of paper so as to be able to rearrange them understood this as well as the contemporary data analyst. Over against the assumption that data is dematerialized information flowing in an imaginary frictionless space, then, this session proposes that data has always had architecture. We invite papers that explore the material infrastructures that gather, store, index, aggregate, and dissimulate data: from cabinets that file paperwork to buildings that house bureaucracies and from graphs and tables that make data visible to data centers and satellites in orbit that push it out of sight. How can these spatial and material histories start sketching an historical ontology of data? What concepts, artifacts, techniques, and institutions have been playing roles in these histories? And, finally, how might historical accounts of data challenge the technological master- narratives on which histories of architectural modernity have been based?

Session chairs: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, University of Toronto, zeynep.celik@utoronto.ca and Lucia Allais, Princeton University, allais@princeton.edu

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EMOTIONAL HISTORIES OF ARCHITECTURE

Louis Sullivan defied his profession’s orthodoxies in a 1894 AIA convention address titled “Emotional Architecture as Compared with Classical.” Deploring the state of contemporary design pedagogy, he argued “how deeply necessary it is that a technical or intellectual training be supplemented by a full, a rich, a chaste development of the emotions.” Sullivan’s unfamiliar antinomies of “emotional” versus “classical” architecture confound us, indeed instructively. An architectural historiography grounded solely in formal, technical and intellectual constructs is poorly equipped to evaluate emotions as evidence. Our discipline’s limitations render Sullivan’s discourse odd and inscrutable.

That situation is changing, thanks to methodological innovations in the burgeoning field of the history of emotions. Reassessing interior states conventionally assumed to be “hardwired” and universal, the field’s pioneers insist upon the historical specificity, contingency, and transience of emotional expressions. Analyzing emotive terms embedded in primary documents, they produce nuanced readings of affect as a social and cultural construct. Concepts including “emotional navigation,” “emotional regimes,” “emotional communities” (characterized by particular “systems of feeling” and “emotional styles”) and “emotional labor” bear close scrutiny by architectural historians. Familiar buildings, newly contextualized by emotive evidence discovered in their corresponding texts, bear unforeseen witness to architectural enterprises and the societies that initiate them.

This session invites papers that serve as case studies in how research methods developed in the field of the history of emotions can inform and broaden architectural history, and which suggest, conversely, how architectural history might offer unique contributions to the history of emotions. Abandoning impressionistic readings of architectural affect, papers in this session will explicitly evaluate methodologies that embed built objects within their emotional context(s). Proposals from scholars of all periods and geographies are welcome.

Session chair: Greg Castillo, University of California, Berkeley; gregcastillo@berkeley.edu

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FROM DRAWING TO BUILDING: REWORKING ARCHITECTURAL DRAWING

It is understood that drawing leads to building. However, the movement from one to the other is neither direct nor determined in advance. It is the presence of this ‘indeterminacy’ that creates a specific locus of research. There is, as Robin Evans (1997) has argued, a constitutive ‘gap’ between drawing and building that demands a revision of architectural history. This ‘gap’ constitutes a site in which the project of the history of architecture can be rethought and the appropriate theoretical dimensions to that rethinking incorporated. For Evans the gap is the general condition of architectural drawing. In sum this session—From Drawing to Building: Reworking Architectural Drawing—will allow for a productive rethinking of the relationship between drawing and building; a relationship that has implications as much in history and theory as it does to architectural pedagogy and contemporary practices of design.

This session will concentrate on those architectural drawings that occur apart from the ones created for what can be described as the legal documentation of the construction processes. In other words, emphasis will be given to those drawings that are used to communicate concepts and meanings central to the discipline of architecture. Furthermore, the session will emphasize interest in the specific techniques and conventions of the perspective and the axonometric as techniques used to convey spatial strategies. Even though tied to specific periods and individual practices, drawings using these techniques represent distinctive disciplinary propositions.

Through these conventions and techniques, image-based representations provide transactional visual environments that are instrumental in the development of architectural knowledge. Such provocations for the discipline are beyond any authorial desire for architecture’s substantiation in building. This session will invite papers from a range of historical periods to open discussion on the functionality of the ‘gap’ between drawings and buildings.

Session chairs: Desley Luscombe, University of Technology Sydney, Desley.luscombe@uts.edu.au and Andrew Benjamin, Monash University Melbourne, andrew.benjamin@monash.edu

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REPLICAS: CONTENTIOUS RECONSTRUCTIONS OF THE PAST

‘Replica’ architectures employ selective ideas of the past to construct the self-image of states, cultures, organizations or powerful individuals in the present, often operating in service of radically conservative ideologies. Frequently promoted through the rhetoric of ‘reconstruction’, these projects are seldom ‘literal’ reconstructions. Rather, they involve the tendentious reclamation of historic architectural or urban forms to reinforce identity narratives, however tenuous or counterfactual their historical veracity. Such projects advance certain political, religious or socio-cultural worldviews or reinforce certain structures of power, preserving distinctions. While architecture has always conveyed ideologies or legitimized a particular social or political order, ‘reconstruction’ projects imagined to embody authority, or which transmit counterfactual histories, sit on the margins of our discipline. Yet they are profoundly interesting as material artifacts. The stories of their life in use are just as interesting as the stories of their procurement and construction. Striking in their own contexts, such “replicas” are often stranger when examined from another cultural, temporal or political vantage point.

The study of replicas is interdisciplinary, implicating architecture as well as philosophy, cultural studies, memory studies and cultural geography. We are interested in papers that examine:
• the intentions and anxieties of their patrons and makers
• the significance of retelling or reorienting stories and myths in the service of dominant or distinctive ideologies
• the shifting relations, incipient contradictions, or unwitting ironies that emerge between originals and replicas, as the latter respond to new programs, contemporary materialities, regulations and techniques of construction
• questions of collective memory, official history and the politics of preservation

Theoretically informed proposals that ground these questions in actual sites and practices from a broad range of geographies and time periods are welcome.

Session chairs: Adam Sharr, Newcastle University, adam.sharr@ncl.ac.uk Zeynep Kezer, Newcastle University, Zeynep.Kezer@ncl.ac.uk

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THE TENT: ONE OF ARCHITECTURE’S MANY GUISES

From the palace and pleasure garden to the military campaign and refugee camp, the tent exemplifies a realm that is ephemeral (although not evanescent), mediatory between the natural and built environments, and, as architecture ‘built’ out of textiles, insistently foregrounding a foundation in craftsmanship. Transformed into icons, tents have also been fixed in palatial and domestic interiors as ‘tent-rooms’ in places as geographically and historically diverse as, for example, the Norman palace in Palermo, Malmaison, and Graceland. Be it as structure, site, or icon, the tent offers a critical lens for investigating architecture’s fluid and yet (often) uneasy co-existence with nature, craft, and ephemerality. To date, the most comprehensive study of tent architecture (indeed, of tents as architecture) has been Peter A. Andrews’ Felt Tents and Pavilions: the Nomadic Tradition and its Interaction with Princely Tentage (1999). Andrews’ volumes not only offer a useful catalog of medieval and early modern tents, but they also draw attention to the ways in which tents instantiate a crucial meeting-point between East and West. This panel seeks to highlight the possibilities of rethinking architectural theory and practice afforded through a careful study of tents. Our session will take a wide angle view of the phenomenon of the tent, both geographically and chronologically, and so papers are invited that treat any place or period. Plausible topics include, but are not limited to, tents as gifts, engineers of alternate realities, markers of hybrid temporalities, textiles, sites of war, and symbols of an irrepressible pre-modernity.

Session chairs: Zirwat Chowdhury, Reed College, zirwat@reed.edu; William Tronzo, University of California, San Diego, wtronzo@yahoo.com

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WATERY NETWORKS

If architecture and cities have long been characterized by fixity, groundedness, and a formative relationship to land, how might a maritime perspective shift our understanding? Following the pioneering work of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean, Kurti Chaudhuri on the Indian Ocean, and Paul Lovejoy on the Black Atlantic, historians have not only reinvigorated Mediterranean studies and encouraged the growth of trans- Atlantic studies, they have also begun to identify transnational geographies as similarly fruitful sites for exploration, including the Black Sea, the Swahili Coast, and the Red Sea. This session considers how historic connections across the sea—created through networks of trade, imperial expansion, systems of communication, and/or migrations of people—have facilitated the transmission of ideas about architecture and have shaped buildings and cities across these watery terrains.

We seek papers that explore, either in case studies or more broadly analytic investigations, the possibilities, challenges, and potential pitfalls of thinking architecture from the mid-fifteenth century to the present through an oceanic lens. Although the age of European exploration put many regions into commercial and cultural dialogue, we seek work that opens onto less familiar routes, such as the swansong of Ming exploration or Arab trade across the Indian Ocean. Papers engaging the urban scale are especially encouraged. Our aim is to bring together architectural historians who work on geographically disparate places to consider the methodological ties that bind them. What lessons might be learned about how buildings and cities are shaped by transnational networks built across systems of water and transformed by the movements and complex cultural affiliations of individuals and groups? How do we negotiate the desire for a global outlook with the localized dynamics of particular sites?

Session chairs: Sheila Crane, University of Virginia, scrane@virginia.edu; and Mark Hinchman, Taylors University, Malaysia, MarkAlan.Hinchman@taylors.edu.my

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WHAT CANON? QUESTIONS OF LANDSCAPE HISTORY

A canon of landscape architectural history has emerged just as art and architectural historians have questioned the value and limits of the idea of any canon. Landscape history has expanded in the context of Marxist, feminist, and race-based critiques of established canons in art and architectural history. This critical condition has produced a landscape architectural canon both more inclusive and less defined, one at once more porous and thicker. Crossing disciplinary boundaries, scholars have investigated the complex connections between the fields of landscape architecture and architecture, ecology and environment, resiliency and sustainability, cities and urbanism. A canon of sorts has emerged, though by no means static or clearly grounded in any one approach. This session seeks to explore what the canon defines and what are the manifestations, limits, and potential areas of exposure. The session seeks to consider the role of critique in historical narratives and the development of the canon- where and what is the appropriate critical role? How has critique become an historical tool? Papers that consider landscapes in non-Western cultures would be appropriate, as would alternative views of canonic places. We encourage papers addressing the relationship of architecture and landscape architecture, urban design and planning, environmental design and analysis. Papers might present completed research projects or those still being theorized. We seek papers that suggest alternative views and challenging perspectives that will contribute to the growing body of scholarship in landscape architectural history.

Session chair: Thaisa Way, University of Washington, tway@uw.edu