Society of Architectural Historians
64th Annual Meeting
April 13-17, 2011
New Orleans, Louisiana
Call for Papers
DRIVING HISTORY: CARS IN/AS ARCHITECTURE
From the moment Karl Benz perfected the modern automobile, architecture has
contended with this most ubiquitous of machines. This session is dedicated to the
historical, cultural, and artistic intertwining of cars and buildings over a century.
Modernist interest in the car is well known, from Le Corbusier’s juxtaposition of
car and temple to car factory designs by Albert Kahn and Matte Trucco that served as
modernist typologies. Wright, Neutra, and Archigram embraced the car as a technology
that would radically transform architecture, the Smithsons drew inspiration from the
Jeep, Citroën and Cadillac, and GM turned to Saarinen to affirm brand identity. The
Chevy “Suburban” meanwhile hailed an architecturally-determined lifestyle. The car was
equally relevant to post-modernism: Venturi and Scott-Brown’s Learning from Las Vegas
and Koolhaas’s team in Lagos relied on observations from moving vehicles, the latter
example reminding us of the centrality of the car to the documentation of architecture in
Asia, Latin America and Africa. Yet the historical consideration of the relationship between cars and architecture is largely isolated (for instance, in the scholarship of Reyner Banham) and anecdotal (by regarding the car as a pop phenomenon). This session instead posits that the car is an inextricable part of architectural history that necessitates a reconsideration of the methodological distinction between architectural history and design history, environmental studies, and cultural studies. We seek papers that examine or reveal the ways cars have shaped architecture and the ways architecture has shaped cars—not accidentally, but intentionally, in all countries and time periods of the automotive era. Papers may also examine how history has explored or occluded an automotive dimension to architecture. Please submit proposals to: Gabrielle Esperdy, Associate Professor of Architectural History, NJIT School of Architecture, University Heights, Newark, NJ 07102; 973-596-3026; [log in to unmask]; and Simon Sadler, Professor of Architectural and Urban History, University of California, Davis, Art Building, 1 Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616; 530-304-5722; [log in to unmask]
Members and friends of the Society of Architectural Historians are invited to submit
abstracts by 14 August 2010. Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be sent directly to the appropriate session chair; abstracts are to be headed with the applicant’s name, professional affiliation [graduate students in brackets], and title of paper. Submit with the abstract a short curriculum vitae, home and work addresses, email addresses, and telephone and fax numbers. 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, nor presented in public except to a
small, local audience. Only one submission per author will be accepted. All abstracts will
be held in confidence during the selection process.
Thematic session chairs will notify all persons submitting abstracts to thematic sessions of the acceptance or rejection of their proposals by 13 September 2010. All session chairs have the prerogative to recommend changes to the abstract in order to coordinate it with a session program, 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 meeting. Authors of accepted proposals must submit the complete text of their papers to their session chair by 10 January 2011. Session chairs will return papers with comments to speakers by 7 February 2011. Speakers must complete any revisions and distribute copies of their paper to the session chair and the other session speakers by 28 February 2011. 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
New Orleans. SAH has a limited number of partial fellowships for which Annual Meeting
speakers may apply. However, SAH’s funding is not sufficient to support the expenses of
all speakers. For information about SAH Annual Meeting fellowships, please visit our
website at www.sah.org.
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