Please see below for a proposed session for the ECLAS 2017 Conference in Greenwich, 10-13 September.
Abstracts should be submitted via the conference website: https://eclas2017london.com/conference/call-for-papers/
Please indicate your preference for this session in your submission.
Session title:
Landscapes as reactions to the creation of post-war infrastructures (1945-1975)
Session chairs:
Richard Brook
Manchester School of Architecture, Chatham Building, Cavendish Street, M15 6BR
0161 247 1131
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Luca Csepely-Knorr
Manchester School of Architecture, Chatham Building, Cavendish Street, M15 6BR
0161 247 6924
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Laura Coucill
Manchester School of Architecture, Chatham Building, Cavendish Street, M15 6BR
0161 247 6940
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Proposal:
Infrastructures of power, water and transportation designed after World War 2 were fundamental in supporting the modernising social ideals of the post-war period and also exemplified the alternative socio-economic and technological and cultural contexts across Europe. These physically engineered landscapes symbolised the varied political structures of different countries and regions during the heyday of internationally adopted modernism. The technological advances and political conditions facilitated a completely new scale of development and new collaborative approaches in the design professions. The creation of these new infrastructures changed rural, peripheral and urban landscapes of Europe enormously; this session invites discussions on the reaction of various professions to this change.
In Britain, this reaction was materialised in the “official adoption of landscape architects to work on new towns, highways, industrial sites, reservoirs, university campuses and power stations”. The professional interest in these new challenges can be traced through the wide discussion of different aspects in professional journals, publications and exhibitions, such as the 1964 touring exhibition Industry & Landscape, and conferences such as the Landscaping of Motorways Conference (1962), and in decisive theoretical and practical guides such as Sylvia Crowe's major publications, The Landscape of Power and The Landscape of Roads. These changes came in tandem with the formation of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (1948), which created a formal platform for international professional discourse, this allowed landscape architects from countries with very different historical and political backgrounds to share their experience, ideas and theories.
The application of the term modernism in the historicisation of landscape architecture in Europe is contested. Modernism has popularly expanded to encompass waves of practice across the twentieth century and multiple-modernisms are described in a range of cultural fields. What does this mean to a pan-European comparison in the definition of the modern, modernising and modernist landscapes of infrastructure?
We invite papers that reflect on the key ideas of the creation of post-war infrastructures and the reaction of the various professions to infrastructures, their architecture and landscapes in different social, political and historical circumstances.
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