CfP: 8th Savannah Symposium: Modernities Across Time and Space
CALL FOR PAPERS
The 8th Savannah Symposium: MODERNITIES ACROSS TIME AND
SPACE
February 7-9, 2013
Keynote Speakers: Mark Jarzombek, MIT and Dell Upton,
UCLA
The art historian T. J. Clark spoke for many scholars
when he declared that
modernity marked a special historical transition when
“the pursuit of a
projected future – of goods, pleasures, freedoms, forms
of control over
nature, or infinities of information” overcame tradition
and ritual. He
distinguished the last 500 years against all previous
time, and the west
against the rest of the world. But such a bold assertion has opened
itself to diverse interpretations. Is there a single modernity? If so,
how
was it created, disseminated and adopted? Or, alternately, are there
actually multiple modernities? How then can we appreciate the diversity of
different cultures and different times?
The 8th Savannah Symposium seeks papers investigating
modernity and/or
modernities in the broadest and most critical terms. Studies addressing
any
aspect of architecture, landscape or the imagined
environment are welcome,
as are works that address empirical, methodological, or
theoretical
approaches. The
significance of the split-level house in
mid-twentieth-century suburbanization is as relevant to
the topic as
postcolonial reinterpretations of world
architecture. Investigations of
attempts to assert modernity, as suggested by the origins
of the very word
"modern" deriving from the Latin modernus from
modo, "just now," (marking a
5th-century desire to distinguish the Christian era from
the Pagan era) are
as welcome as discussions of cultural hybridity where
modernity is actively
negotiated.
Studies focusing on particular sites or examples of modern
architecture are welcomed as are interpretations of who
determined the
modernity, when and where did it occur, and how was it
presented and
promoted?
Suggested topics for the symposium might include:
● Modern
buildings across cultures and times
● Global
processes of modernization and their consequences for the built
environment
● Modernity as
a way of seeing and shaping the world
● Architectural
and planning apparatuses of the modern global state
● Ideas of
newness in architecture and urbanism
● Anti-historicism
in architecture throughout time
● Reactions
against aspects of the modern world—local, regional, national
and global
● Preservation
as a 20th-century modern value
● What does it
mean to teach “non-western” topics in a western architecture
program, particularly, but not inclusively, twentieth and
twenty-first-century subjects?
● How is the
modern architectural canon defined by its classical language?
● Can one even
speak of a global modernity without evoking a western
ideological framework for knowledge?
● What are the
urban and shelter needs of the rapidly expanding global city?
● How do you
talk about modernity and urbanism without Asia or Africa or
South America?
Papers are invited from scholars and practitioners in,
but not limited to,
architecture, architectural history, urban history,
planning, historic
preservation, landscape design, art history, geography,
archaeology,
cultural history, sociology, political science and
anthropology.
Participants will be invited to submit developed essays
for an edited
thematic volume to be proposed.
How to Participate: Send one-page abstracts (300 words
maximum) and
curriculum vitae to Patrick Haughey [phaughey@scad.edu]
and Daves Rossell
[erossell@scad.edu] c/o Department of Architectural
History, Savannah
College of Art and Design, 102 Eichberg Hall, 229 MLK Jr.
Blvd., P.O. Box
3146, Savannah, GA 31402-3146. Electronic submissions are preferred. For
more information about the symposium (and past symposia),
visit our website
at
Deadline for submissions:
July 15, 2012.