EVENT + CALL FOR PARTICIPATION
This event is free to attend and will consist of a morning lecture and afternoon seminar with two guest speakers. We welcome PhD students and early career scholars who are interested in participating in the afternoon seminar. Further details about the event and how to apply for travel bursaries can be found below.
ANOTHER SCENOGRAPHY FOR ARCHITECTURE: EXPERIENCE AND A RENEWED EMPIRICISM
University of Manchester, UK
06 June 2019
10am - 6 pm
Rm 1.69/1.70 Humanities Bridgeford Street Building
Guest Speakers:
- Prof. Hélène Frichot - Professor of Architecture in Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture at KTH
"Creative Ecologies: Environment-Worlds, Things, and Thinkables"
- Dr. Keith Murphy - Associate Professor of Anthropology at UC Irvine.
"Critical Empiricism in a World of Designed Things"
Event Description:
Experience is often cut in two: split between a brute and passive materiality and the active subjective representations added to it. In the diagnosis of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, it is bifurcated between primary and secondary qualities, whether in terms of nature and culture, mind and matter, words and things, subject and object. Architectural and urban theory is still stuck within this scenography: either a passive built form that reflects or acts according to subjective representations, cultural, social, political and economic forces; or an active built environment that determines behaviour, structures social relations, or produces percepts. Either one or the other. But this affords a rather anaemic understanding of architectural experience! If, in the spirit of a ‘renewed empiricism’, we would like to learn from experience again, it is essential to escape this dualism and engage with another scenography. One populated with many more actors and scripts: the surprising agency of objects and materials, with different kinds of expertise, knowledge and activities, and set within a heterogeneous and relational ‘ecology of practices’.
This workshop aims to explore this different scenography through a broader concept of experience, taking inspiration from the pragmatist tradition of the early 20th century, its revival in the methodology of Actor-Network Theory, and in contemporary philosophy. On the one hand, this concept of experience allows us to multiply and reconfigure the boundaries of what constitutes architecture: from the use of space, the design practices of architects, politics of construction, urban and infrastructural ecologies, to architectural aesthetics and the annals of architectural history. On the other hand, it forces us to rethink our methodological tactics for researching it, and to re-orient the production of architectural knowledge. The aim is to collectively experiment and discuss this difficult notion of experience by testing it against empirics drawn from our individual investigations and its potential for informing architectural thought and research.
How to Apply:
We welcome proposals to participate in the afternoon session from early career / PhD researchers on the concept of experience within architectural practice and research. Proposals should illustrate how ‘experience’ manifests in your research (through its questions and means) and how it assists the group in exploring this within architecture. A small number of BURSARIES for travel are available. To apply please send an abstract (Max 250 words) by May 06 2019 to: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
Organisers: Brett Mommersteeg, Ben Blackwell, David Johnson, Simon Mitchell
Brett Mommersteeg
Doctoral Researcher, Architecture
The University of Manchester
MA, Theory and Criticism
+44 07521187557
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