>
> Making a New World? Re-forming/designing Modern Communities in 
> Inter-war
> Europe
>
>
> International colloquium in Belgium, University of Leuven, 
> 09-10/06/2006
>
>
>
> * Keywords: architecture - modernity - community - reformist modernism 
> -
> inter-war - cultural identities
>
> * 250 word abstracts are due on 31 December 2005. They will be reviewed
> by
> the planning committee of the International Research Community Cultural
> Identities, World Views and Architecture at the beginning of Januar.
>
> * address for the proposals: [log in to unmask]
>
>
>
> CALL FOR PAPERS
>
> The history of the avant-garde in architecture and urbanism in the
> interwar period has been studied extensively. Less well known are the
> strategies, discourses and practices that were developed by other, more
> moderate, groups in response to the disrupting experience of modernity;
> in particular those who sought to deal with the contradictions of 
> modern
> life by appropriating parts of modernity and by re-negotiating the
> meaning of 'community' in its confrontation with 'society' (Tönnies) In
> announcing this call, we aim to bring together a series of papers which
> will offer new insights into the relationship between architecture and
> modernity in the inter-war decades and, in so doing, initiate a 
> revision
> of our understandings of where innovations in space-making took place 
> at
> this time.
>
> We are interested in those individuals and organisations that engaged
> with modernity not in a straightforward and often dogmatic, way, as did
> the avant-garde, but rather with a cautious 'yes, but ...'. Such groups
> shared with the avant-garde the desire to develop new forms and spaces
> but did not follow its thoroughgoing acceptance of all the requirements
> and contradictions of modern life (up to the idea that 'art would 
> die').
> Our subjects are, then, those who pleaded for a 'reformist' approach to
> modernity, taking advantage of some of its potentialities (e.g.
> technology, efficiency, rationality, new forms of mass media) but
> accommodating this within an attitude that was not aimed towards a
> complete social or political revolution, but rather a quiet, less
> disruptive and non-revolutionary transformation of society.
>
> There are good reasons to assume that in architecture and urbanism,
> reformist modernism was in fact the dominant practice in the inter-war
> period. Moreover, the ability of its practitioners to deploy the notion
> of 'community' to bridge different ways of thinking makes it an
> interesting starting point to analyse the ideological constructions
> which underpinned a wide range of building practices in these years. In
> this way community can be, besides an evocative symbol, an analytical
> tool. As a complex, polyvalent concept that combines a material and an
> imagined dimension, it can serve as a prism to provide insight in
> broader processes of cultural positioning. Our concern then both
> methodological and historiographical. This international colloquium
> will, in four distinct though correlated strands, explore the different
> scenarios in which the idea of 'community' were deployed by diverse
> social and ideological groups to counterbalance the homogenizing forces
> of modernity and through which would be forged the social and political
> landscape of post-war Europe.
>
>
> I. Symbolic Forms and Imagined Communites
>
>
> 1. Landmarks
>
> The Bauhaus Manifesto of 1919 appeared with a woodcut by Feininger on
> the cover, representing a cathedral as the shining symbol of an
> imaginary community of workers, artisans and artists, who would join
> their forces to joyfully build a new and bright future through the
> collaboration of progressive minds. Although this kind of symbolism
> would disappear from later Bauhaus publications, which, in the spirit 
> of
> the New Sobriety, used a much more abstract and constructivist 
> language,
> its initial importance is quite significant. It means that in this
> particular variant of modernism, the symbolic value of a tower as the
> centre around which a community organizes itself, was recognized and
> validated. It also referred to the mythic ideal of the medieval
> Bauhütte, where artisans, Baumeisters, painters and sculptors laboured
> as a unified community to build the ultimate building of splendour,
> reverence and joy. Such images were probably operational in other
> locations and organizations too but these have thus far enjoyed less
> attention from scholars. Therefore, we invite abstracts in which the
> role of such images in the architectural practices and discourses of 
> the
> modernist movement are analyzed.
>
>
> 2. Ideology under construction
>
> In this strand, we wish to explore how ideological groups tried to make
> invisible meanings ('a commonality') tangible by using texts, images 
> and
> spectacles in which architecture and  building practices were given a
> primary role. The ambition of some ideological groups of the inter-war
> period to retrieve a sense of community, is often labelled with the 
> term
> nostalgia (nostos - return home, and algia - longing). Although the
> adage 'who we are, depends on who we were', was quite dominant in the
> inter-war period, differentiations have to be made. The term 
> 'reflective
> nostalgia', can signal a self-aware and prospective attitude that does
> not shy away from the contradictions of modernity. 'Restorative
> nostalgia' on the other hand, is quite the opposite: it is 
> retrospective
> and tries to start up a trans-historical reconstruction of a lost home.
>
> In the inter-war period, those two versions of dealing with anxiety
> about a changing world melted together in a specific way: Catholics and
> socialists, nationalists and fascists looked at architecture as a
> powerful tool for community building. By making a simultaneous
> connection with a built reality in the past and future, they tried to
> empower their ideological ideas. In political discourses, philosophical
> texts, poetry or prose, building metaphors served as a mode of
> emplotment. Specific rituals (the laying of the first stone or the
> inauguration of important buildings) created a liturgy of collective
> harmony. In spectacles, especially mass plays, architectural elements
> (eg, temple-like buildings) were incorporated. All these discourses and
> practices not only pointed to a rigid past (fundaments, cornerstones),
> but also embodied an active future: the own community became a building
> project. We therefore call for papers which address different aspects 
> of
> this form of ritual.
>
>
> II. Sites of Emancipation and Re-formation
>
>
> 1. Landscape and Community.
>
> In the inter-war period, discussions of the imagination of community 
> and
> the representation of landscape were deeply intertwined. In multiple
> discourses, the landscape was the preferred canvas on which a nation's
> identity was constructed and defined. Landscape formed, therefore, a
> double-edged shuttle between processes of objectification and
> subjectification and it enabled a complex exchange between an
> understanding of territory as given and a vision of that same
> environment as a world to be shaped. The construction of the German
> Autobahn network, the emergence of nationwide infrastructure for
> vacationing, the search for the natural region and its corresponding
> architecture, the promotion of cartographic literacy as a way of
> building an experience of nationhood, etc,  all present different
> dimensions of the way in which landscape was deployed in this
> double-edged capacity.
>
> In this strand we wish to explore the extent to which both the physical
> and symbolical reproduction of landscapes played a role in the
> construction of group-identity, contributing both to the organization 
> as
> well as the narration of communities. Should we understand the
> conspicuous investment in the language of landscape as a belated and
> desperate attempt to narrate into existence a sense of community which
> was no longer extant, or rather as an effective vehicle for the
> construction of a new sensus communis ?
>
>
> 2. Internal Colonies
>
> In the inter-war period the relation between modernity and community 
> was
> perhaps articulated most remarkably in the establishment of internal
> colonies across Europe. These social and spatial entities were
> symbolically located far from home but were in reality strongly 
> embedded
> within the homeland, and became a preferred disciplinary model for
> social, hygienist and educational reform.
>
> The vacation colony is the best-known model of such colonies and it has
> its origin in the second half of the 19th century in the thoughts of
> hygienist thinkers (Leuch, Warrentrap, Cartaz) from Switzerland, 
> Germany
> and France. Constructed as opposing poles to industrialising and 
> growing
> urban centres, these colonies were designed to 'repair bodies' and
> 'restore the souls' and were thought to be harvesting grounds of free
> air, openness and health. The colonies however, were intended to do 
> much
> more. Organisers often had a distinct social and political agenda and
> could originate in rival political and social philosophies, a desire to
> separate church and state, from private and local welfare initiatives,
> and different viewpoints on child development and education. Other
> examples of internal colonies aimed at social reform are new sites for
> education (the progressive boarding schools of inter-war Britain or the
> village college) and labour colonies for vagrants (Germany, Holland,
> Belgium, Switzerland). Such colonies could also take the form of model
> environments for urban living (new housing estates) or new forms of
> urban social life (workers' clubs). This session aims to provide a 
> forum
> for scholarship on the historical, ideological, and socio-pedagogical
> characteristics of the internal colony. We invite abstracts exploring
> the ways in which architects and urban planners across Europe invoked
> the internal colony in their work - in written, built, or imagined 
> form.
>
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------
> Elizabeth Darling PhD
> Architectural History & Theory
> School of Architecture & Design
> University of Brighton
> Mithras House
> Lewes Rd
> Brighton
> BN2 4AT
> t: 00 44 (0)1273 642349
> f: 00 44 (0)1273 642348
> e: [log in to unmask]
> www.brighton.ac.uk/arts/research
>
> -----------------------------------------------
> Editorial Board Member & Reviews Editor
> Journal of Design History
> http://jdh.oxfordjournals.org/
> the journal of the
> Design History Society
> www.designhistorysociety.org
> ------------------------------------------------