Call for Papers: Closed

[Closed] 10 February: Deadline to submit summaries.
29 February: Deadline to notification admitted lecturers.
15 March: Deadline to submit a complete paper.

The three-day conference will focus on a specific subject each day, but each one will fall under the general conference topic. We hope this will be the first of a series of conferences, and that as many papers as possible can be presented by people ready to discuss the current status of contemporary architecture. We have prepared a specific text for each of the three days, together with a list of the major topics we would like to address. We feel they will be a useful guide to define the papers submitted, clarify the message they should transmit and classify the topics to be discussed into three main groups.

At the end of each day’s program, a panel discussion will be held that is presided over by the main speakers on the topic of the day, which we trust will lead to lively discussion on new perspectives in the areas of architecture, design and critical thought.

Thank you for the high level of participation in the symposium. The Call for Papers is now closed. We will make a selection of the best summaries. The selected applicants, will be invited for a 15 to 20 min presentation at symposium. Also they will share discussion panel with the rest of the guests and the thematic director that will take place at the end of the day.

Alfred North Whitehead explains in The concept of nature that there are no such things as forms, but transitions in time. However, these transitions are sometimes so slow that we perceive them as static objects.

Because materials are tangible, we have always been able to create spaces, which vary depending on how the materials are arranged and adapted and how they interact. Let’s not forget that materials are resources, and to ensure they are long-lasting and can be regenerated in accordance with the 21st-century agenda (bearing in mind the influence of the Kyoto Protocol on everything that refers to sustainability), we must give them a special name: S-generation materials.

For this section, we are interested in all architecture and design generated formally, structurally or organizationally based on studies of materials performance. As Frank Lloyd Wright said, forms that are suitable for one material cannot be suitable for another. We are also interested in architecture that takes the natural environment as its model and instrumentalizes Nature’s strategies for generating form and organizing material. We therefore talk about bottom-up processes, nevertop-down ones.

Our interest will focus on architectures and designs that propose highly efficient (not optimal) multifunctional models. The main point is to understand the models and take full advantage of their possibilities. We will address ecology not only from the perspective of the reuse and recycling of materials, but also from the perspective that the more efficient, multifunctional and cheaper a system is, the more environmentally friendly it is.

This section will therefore be approached from D’Arcy Thompson’s empirical perspective, according to which forms should be understood as diagrams of forces exerted on those forms for a specific period of time; and from Robert Venturi’s more postmodern perspective, with his elements of dual function in architecture (as a critique of the superabstraction of the Modern Movement) that corresponded entirely to the multifunctionality of natural systems

Since the Modern Movement began to fade away, which happened at the same time as markedly stylistic historicist revisions, architectural theory has shown great interest in positivist design methodologies.

Studies of architectural complexity and dynamic systems have stirred renewed interest in networks, bottom-up methods, adaptive systems, genetics and the automatic creation of form as the fundamentals of a new generation of design techniques. Furthermore, the universalization of digital technologies in the last decade has made it possible, once and for all, to make the necessary verifications and produce clear results of all this research.

This section will focus on new methodologies that offer a wider range of possibilities for architecture and set up solid bridges between theory and praxis, by providing new ways of designing.

Although the papers included in this section will focus on a common topic, they should not depend on technology or information systems, so we understand these papers can be completely independent.

Information technology in architecture is already a fact and its introduction definitively marked the beginning of a new era. It has opened the door to a specific logic that enables us not only to obtain optimum results, but also to approach new logics and create complete, efficient systems. As mentioned above, it enables us to speak of self-organizing and emergent systems.

This section will deal with the kind of architecture that is possible thanks to the latest advances in digital technologies. Our interest will focus on papers that depend directly on instrumentation, i.e. new tools that enable us to produce and think. Architectural developments have taken place that were difficult to imagine just five years ago. Similarly, we are unable to imagine what architecture will be like in five years’ time, because it will require tools that may not have been invented yet, and involve processes using those tools that we are technically incapable of controlling. So we may be speaking about architecture that is not built or is intangible; architecture that may be beyond our material possibilities at this moment in time, but very real nonetheless.

However, this architecture based on exuberant proposals will be followed by modelling, design and production systems that will enable us to control its geometry and production with exacting precision. We will therefore be particularly interested in including this set of tools, its control and its future in our debate.

Sponsors