Enfilade

From the conference website:

Alternative Enlightenments: An Interdisciplinary Conference in the Humanities
Bilkent University, Ankara, Turkey, 26-28 April 2013

Proposals due by 1 December 2012

Keynote Speakers

Wijnand Mijnhardt, Professor of History and Director of the Descartes Centre, University of Utrecht
Felicity Nussbaum, Professor of English, UCLA

From Kant’s seminal essay “What is Enlightenment?” through the manifold critical responses of the twentieth century, the ambiguity of a term designating both a paradigmatic approach to human intellect or autonomy, and a specific historical period, remains. How distinct is the concept of Enlightenment from the era of European history long taken to have discovered or invented it? This symposium proposes an examination of Enlightenments in the plural, welcoming both revisionary accounts of the Age of Enlightenment and explorations of Enlightenment in other times and places.

With an eye to translating the idea of Enlightenment, scholars have traced its many national and regional varieties. Discussions of an Ionian or an Athenian Enlightenment, of movements of Enlightenment in the medieval caliphate or the Ottoman Empire, share the contemporary intellectual landscape with debates on the continuing relevance of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to the current global order. We are interested in the way the term has been borrowed and translated, creating a constellation of “Enlightenments” bound together by family resemblances. Is there still a singular project of Enlightenment (i.e. the critique of received ideas and inherited values, in particular religious ones; the promotion of rational or empirical methods; the creation of cosmopolitan and secular spaces), or has the term broken out of its historical mold to designate a more fluid set of cultural projects and practices?

Where do we stand today with regard to the Enlightenment? After all, the continuation of a politics and practice of Enlightenment may depend on the spatial and temporal translations we propose to explore. Such displacements give new life to the idea of Enlightenment, even as the term is contested, criticized and transformed.

Topics of interest include:

• Ionian / Athenian Enlightenment
• Secularism, materialism, the immanent frame
• Literatures of Worldliness in East and West: Renaissance, Tanzimat, Arab and Near Eastern Enlightenments
• Orientalism and Occidentalism
• Diplomacy, correspondence, the figure of the court philosopher
• What is Enlightenment: Kant, Foucault and beyond
• (The) Enlightenment in the Americas
• The public and the private: cross-cultural studies of an Enlightenment distinction
• Travel literature, satire, and utopian fiction
• Nineteenth century national Enlightenments, nationalism vs. internationalism
• Enlightenment and Empire
• The rhetoric of Enlightenment in geopolitics, the claims of the West
• Material culture, exchange, circulation, accumulation, dispersal
• Enlightenment and its others: mysticism, hermeticism and the arcane
• The metaphorics of Enlightenment: illumination, dawn, twilight and dusk
• Where do we stand today with regard to (the) Enlightenment? Critical theory / social and political practice

Please submit an abstract of no more than 300 words to wcoker@bilkent.edu.tr by 1 December 2012.

From the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain:

Transitory, Transportable, and Transformable: Temporary Conditions in Architecture
London, 18 May 2013

Proposals due by 15 October 2012

Proposals are invited for papers addressing the theme of Temporary Conditions in Architecture to be presented at the 2013 Annual Symposium of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, to be held at Alan Baxter Associates, 75 Cowcross Street, London  EC1M 6EL, on Saturday 18 May 2013.

Architecture is generally regarded as being, for the most part, permanent, static and immutable. However some significant buildings are intended to be temporary, whereas others are designed to be moved from one location to another or even to be flexible enough to alter their form and appearance as the result of changing requirements. This symposium intends to explore the temporary condition in architecture and to question whether architecture needs to be either permanent, static or immutable.

Transitory: Many buildings are short-lived, but few of them are regarded as serious architecture. In 1661, triumphal arches were erected for Charles II’s coronation procession from the City of London to Westminster. Constructed largely of timber, plaster and canvas, they were architecturally elaborate yet intentionally impermanent, only to be soon swept away. Political expediency, no doubt, necessitated their quick erection, otherwise they might have been built in stone and, like Temple Bar (1670-72), still stand today, albeit not in its original location. Modern materials allow for the quick and permanent erection of buildings such as Team 4’s prize-winning Reliance Controls Electronics Factory at Swindon (1967). Yet despite the longevity of its materials, this building was intentionally short-lived and, having served its purpose, was demolished in 1991. Only the ‘thirty-year rule’ saved it from being listed, as it might well have been. Papers could consider whether the lack of permanence in architecture diminishes its value or, on the other hand, whether the permanence which listing building legislation imposes and implies, ultimately benefits it.

Transportable: The Crystal Palace (1851) was first erected, in Hyde Park, as a temporary building but was soon transported to Sydenham where it was re-erected. This was made possible by its pre-fabricated, component-based assembly process. This thinking allowed pre-fabricated buildings to be sent out across the world by the European colonial powers in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether these be William Slater’s cast-iron church for the Ecclesiologists (1853-56) or Jean Prouvé’s steel barracks for the French army (1939), the use of transportable architecture to establish and promote religious or military, and therefore political control, was the same. Conversely, the practice of retrieving and displaying spolia as a demonstration of political control, such as Napoleon’s relocation to the Arc de Triomphe, in 1797, of the quadriga from St Mark’s Basilica, Venice, shows that architecture can be as easily brought home as it can be sent out. Papers, therefore, might like to investigate the use of transportable architecture as both a vehicle and an affirmation of colonisation and the influence which these buildings had on the national architecture, culture and society of the colony and the coloniser alike.

Transformable: If the Pyramids are regarded as the ultimate expression of permanence in architecture, then the Pompidou Centre, as originally conceived in 1971, might be the antithesis. For here the floors could move, the envelope could be reassembled, and the exposed services regularly modified. Although the floors, in the end, remained static, the building has been noticeably transformed over the years. Today, ‘Legacy’ is one of the key-words for the London 2012 Olympics. Yet few of the buildings destined to remain will be left in their original condition; many will be transformed. The side wings will be loped off Zaha Hadid’s swimming pool and the upper stage will be removed from Populous’s stadium. In considering legacy, papers might ask whether there is a real architectural legacy in such a situation and whether those few buildings which will emerge unscathed, such as, hopefully, Hopkins Architects’ velodrome, will provide the only true reminder of the Olympics.

Abstracts of not more than 250 words should be sent to Professor Neil Jackson at the School of Architecture, University of Liverpool, Abercromby Square, Liverpool L69 7ZN or e-mailed to neil.jackson@liverpool.ac.uk no later than 15 October 2012. Authors will be advised by 3 December 2012 whether or not their paper has been selected.