Discipline and Dissidence | vol. 1, issue 1/2

The inaugural double issue of the journal is entitled Discipline and Dissidence. Our aim is to investigate how the now expanded field of architecture is framed and understood as a discipline, what disciplining processes are at play, and what the cultural consequences are for its role of such strictures and how they shift.  The issue is in two parts.  One part focuses on ‘Discipline’, the other on ‘Dissidence’. Papers for the ‘Discipline’ part, addressing architecture’s disciplinarity, are solicited through this call. It is hoped that placing the two themes will agitate and elucidate both, in perhaps unexpected ways.

Call for Papers

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Architecture and Culture (Open Issue) | Vol. 2, Issue no. 01

Architecture and Culture is the international, peer-reviewed journal of the Architectural Humanities Research Association (AHRA). It investigates the relationship between architecture and the culture that shapes and is shaped by it. Whether culture is understood extensively, as shared experience of everyday life, Architecture and Culture asks how architecture participates in and engages with it – and how both culture and architecture might be reciprocally transformed.

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Call for Papers

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Architecture Film | Vol. 3, Issue no. 1

Issue edited by Dr Igea Troiani and Professor Hugh Campbell

This aim of this issue of Architecture and Culture is to investigate how the now expanded field of architecture utilises film studies, filmmaking (feature film, short film, animation, stop motion animation or documentary) or video/moving image making in practice, teaching or research, and what the consequences are of this interdisciplinary exchange.

While architecture and film have clearly distinct disciplinary outputs, the possible intersection between them is less defined even though there is considerable extant literature and research on this topic. Through this call, we seek papers that investigate the ways in which practicing architects, teachers of architecture and their students, and architectural researchers, filmmakers, animators, documentary makers, social scientists or social geographers, anthropologists, landscape architects, urban designers, interior architects and installation artists are using film uniquely in their practice. We call for explorations of the way in which film contributes to architectural and filmic practice, knowledge and design, seeing the two disciplines side by side as equal, with no prepositions suggesting a specific relationship but at the same time creating a kind of distance and difference between the two.

Call for Papers

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/journal/architecture-and-culture/" title="go to the publisher's site">This issue is available here

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Transgression: Body and Space | Vol.2, issue 3

This special issue will explore the wasy in which the notion of transgression allow us to explore the relationship between the body and space. From Edgar Allen Poe to Georges Bataille, the history of transgression is intimately bound up with ideas of the body, psychology, identity and society. If, as Lefebvre argues, space is a social production, then what role might transgression play? How can understandings of the body (what it is; its relationship with mind, psyche and identity; the manner in which it can enhanced, changed and adapted) affect our understanding and interpretation of space? How can the relationship between the body and space be (re)considered?

Call for Papers

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/journal/architecture-and-culture/" title="go to the publisher's site">This issue is available here

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Urban Atmospheres | vol.3, issue 2

“From a Secondspace perspective, city space becomes more of a mental or ideational field, conceptualized in imagery, reflexive thought, and symbolic representation, a conceived space of the imagination, or what I will henceforth describe as the urban imaginary.”

- Edward W. Soja, Postmetropolis, 2000

“I want to speak of "social imaginary" here, rather than social theory, because there are important differences between the two. There are, in fact, several differences. I speak of "imaginary" (i) because I'm talking about the way ordinary people "imagine" their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, it is carried in images, stories, legends, etc. But it is also the case that (ii) theory is often the possession of a small minority, whereas what is interesting in the social imaginary is that it is shared by large groups of people, if not the whole society. Which leads to a third difference: (iii) the social imaginary is that common understanding which makes possible common practices, and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.”

- Charles Taylor, On Social Imaginary, 2004

Urban narratives, urban myths, urban legends – the fates and futures of cities have long been intertwined with the narratives that imagine, construct, propagate and dismantle them. The contemporary urban imaginary is populated by narratives of every kind – literary evocations, films, mass media descriptions in both words and images, urban geographical accounts, etc.  This broadly themed issue of Architecture and Culture will explore the roles of these narratives in fleshing out and vivifying the qualitative dimensions of cities. It will consider ways in which cities and narratives are co-constitutive, hoping to generate stories that materialize urban atmospheres, and to examine cities that inspire and inform atmospheric tales.

In The World Interior of Capital (2012, published in German as Im Weltinnenraum des Kapitals in 2005), philosopher Peter Sloterdijk draws on two urban narratives constructed by well-known literary figures. The focus of each narrative is a building type, which then becomes a surrogate for the urban atmosphere it both occupies and envelopes. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s impressions of the Crystal Palace in Notes from the Underground (published in 1864) and Walter Benjamin’s description of the Parisian arcades from The Arcades Project (written between 1927 and 1940 as Passagenwerk, published posthumously) become the fodder for Sloterdijk’s ruminations on urban atmosphere in general, and on the particular versions of urban atmosphere that each of these buildings represents. According to Sloterdijk, Benjamin’s enterprise was stifled from the start, as he linked the fate of Parisian atmosphere to an anachronistic typology, the nineteenth-century arcade (for Benjamin, of course, its very outdatedness was what gave it its revelatory powers). But through the Crystal Palace, Sloterdijk argues, Dostoyevsky describes the advent of our globalized age, with its ephemerality and immateriality, climatological control, aesthetics of immersion and air of luxury and cosmopolitanism.

Edited by Amy Kulper and Diana Periton, this issue of Architecture and Culture seeks disparate forms of narrative constructions, whether visual, verbal or aural, that evoke cities and their attendant atmospheres. Like Benjamin and Dostoevsky, we invite original creative narratives on cities, their buildings and their atmospheres, and like Sloterdijk, we encourage meta-narratives examining broader cultural tendencies through the lens of the urban built environment. 

Call for Papers

http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/journal/architecture-and-culture" title="go to the publisher's site">This issue is available here

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Architecture & the Spaces of Information | Vol.4, Issue 1

‘… Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without knowledge of the way the media work as environments’ —Marshall McLuhan, Aspen No.4 1967

‘Architecture stays in one place, while its meaning travels between the covers of books.’ —Charles Jencks, ‘Post-Modernism and the Revenge of the Book’ 2002 

‘The printed book was used to communicate architecture as soon as it became available in the late fifteenth century, and is still being used today. Its dominance may be threatened by new types of medium, but some of its characteristics are likely to be copied in other media that may replace it. For the time being, no other media confers such intellectual respectability whatever its shortcomings may be for communication.’ —Alan Powers ‘The Architectural Book: Image and Accident’, 2002

Since Alan Powers wrote these words some time around 2002, shifts in practice, material, production and media environment have advanced the relationship between audience/user/reader and architectural space. Working between art, editorial design and architecture, between practice and scholarship, in this issue of Architecture and Culture we want to chart and explore the broad trajectory of these changing relationships as they emerge from appropriations of conventional publishing channels to take up more complex spatial dispositions.

Dr. Ruth Blacksell and Dr. Stephen Walker, Editors

Call for Papers

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