For further information please contact Jonathan Hale
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FIELD/WORK
6th Annual AHRA International Conference

University of Edinburgh
Edinburgh College of Art

20-21 November 2009

http://www.ahra-architecture.org/Events_2009_edinburgh.php


Call for Papers: 
Fieldwork has always been integral to the work of architects and
landscape architects and the many forms of associated scholarship, from
the site visit to the grand tour to the social survey. We visit sites -
real and imagined - to collect, order, and interpret data, to establish
parameters, frameworks, contexts, and outlines for design work. As the
sites of design work and scholarship have become increasingly complex
and mediated, the questions as to what and where the field is, how we
collect data, how we ensure its reliability, and how it informs design
work have renewed practical and theoretical significance. New
configurations of fieldwork have blurred traditional distinctions
between subject and object, observer and observed, audience and
performer, material and immaterial, and even fact and fiction.
Relationships between the field, data and creative work have, as a
consequence, become integral to many contemporary forms of design
practice and research.

In this respect, design based disciplines such as architecture and
landscape architecture share a wider heritage with empirically-oriented
disciplines such as anthropology, ethnography, archaeology, material
culture and geography amongst others. This conference seeks to examine
the question of fieldwork in its historical, contemporary, disciplinary
and inter-disciplinary terms. The conference aims to explore the
meaning, relevance and specificity of the term to architecture and
landscape architecture by consciously stretching normative inherited
conceptions of site visit to include notions of crime scene,
reconnaissance, pilgrimage and beyond into corelate practices. The
conference also seeks to draw attention to and consider the often
ignored routines of design work, the habitual or casual handling of
'data', 'evidence', 'facts', 'parameters'
or 'contexts'. Included in this is the wider issue of what it is to work
in the field, the trip to the field, tramissions from the field, the
translations between field and studio, and the processing of data after
the field. With an emphasis on the interplay between theory and
practice, and a focused commitment to exploring the particularities of
design work, we invite critical, historical and creative approaches to
the legacy, currency and potentiality of Field/work, that seek to
complicate, extend, contest and subvert the normative sites, practices
and itineraries of field/work:


to the field:
Often regarded as a less than formal registration of place, how do we
update our understanding of site visit, field trip, study tour as a
potentially critical device in globalised architectural design and
research practice? Implicit conceptions of distance and proximity are
complicated by emerging global networks of personal and institutional
mobility. How do we think of multiplicities of fields and they way they
interact? The three (or
multiple) dimensionality of fields? Are imagined sites still valid as
destinations? How can critical distance be activated locally?

in the field:
What is it to look and see? What, who and where is: the point of view,
the scale, the witness and the gaze, focus and distortion? How has time
and history impacted on the value of embodied visual experience? What
artefacts, networks, narratives are worth looking 'at' or 'for'? How has
the necessary, useful, obsolete of a field or site been conceived or
articulated in the history of architectural practice and spatial
production? What are the inflections and implications of individual and
collective looking? How do disciplines of observation (mapping,
surveying, tagging, tracking) operate and how do they relate to
disciplines of design? Has architecture's interest in / study of /
contact with 'other' been assisted / mediated / filtered by the work of
anthropologists? In what ways might recent developments in 'revisionist
anthropology' suggest critical (re)-readings of
(canonical) 'field work' and site-specific research in architecture?

from the field:
Architects, landscape architects and urbanists employ a range of
graphic, textual, spatial techniques/practices in relation to field and
site. How are hybrid, experimental or contingent methodologies or
processes a practice of design? How is or has fieldwork been 'taught' in
architecture and related disciplines? How do anthropological debates on
power-knowledge, ethnomethodology, sociology impact on architectural
fieldwork? Cyberspace has re-defined notions of space and field, what
are the consequences or opportunities for design praxis? What techniques
and processes are privileged and why? What is edited in or out? 

between field and studio:
If field-work always implies a transmission of material back 'home' from
the field, what media, tools and mechanisms are used and what are the
consequences (ideological, productive, persuasive, etc.) of specific
choices made? How does contact with the field act upon or transform
mediation practices? What is lost in translation? What ways of making
'field' and 'site' (indexical, critical, historical, diagrammatic) are
evident and particular to spatial production, rather than other
materially sited production (film, sculpture, installation art, music
etc)? 

after the field:
The field as a saturated condition that extends conventional concepts of
'site' or 'context' in architecture has opened performance- and
process-based conceptions of design. What are relevant re-scriptings of
'genius loci', 'site-specific', 'contextual' and related architectural
field terms? If empiricism tends to value a contemporary reading of
landscapes, foregrounding subjectivity and subsuming historical takes
from other eras, what are the ramifications for an architectural
practice rooted in the contemporary and the at-hand? How does finding
the limit, tolerance, saturation of a field influence design action? How
do transformations of the term 'field' for instance as a boundary
concept versus a concept to do with intensities and patternings
transform knowledge in architecture and landscape architecture? 


PARTICIPATION:
We initially invite 500 word abstracts from researchers, educators,
practitioners in architecture, landscape architecture and related
disciplines for papers which reflect on and explore the theme from a
range of standpoints (historical, theoretical, experiential, ethical,
political, pedagogical, other). Inventories, case studies, innovative
methodologies which enrich or elucidate Field/work are welcome. The
conference aims to address the conventions of praxis-action and
field-work acrtoss media, scales, cultures, to articulate current
discourses on the topic and to identify critical dilemmas and
opportunities for future practices of design and research. Selected
papers will be published as an edited book as part of the AHRA series. 


TIMETABLE: 
March 31st 2009 	Submission of abstracts
April 2009 	Selection by reviewing committee 
May 2009	Notification of Acceptance
June 2009	Registration open
October 1st 2009 	Submission of full papers
Fri 20th-Sat 21th Nov 2009 	Conference


Submissions by email to:
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AHRA conference 2009
Architecture
School of Arts, Culture and Environment
University of Edinburgh
20 Chambers Street
Edinburgh EH1 1JZ
UK