CCCP ARCH COLLOQUIUM I

The domain of architectural work is multi-faceted, as are the multiple forms of practice and knowledge that reflect back upon it. In this sense architectural expertise appears in many formats, media, and institutional frameworks that extend beyond, while often informing, the discipline’s role in the production of buildings. This heterogeneous field incorporates periodicals, books, exhibitions, installations, research institutes and labs, pedagogy, criticism, manifestos, historical scholarship, posters, films, videos, performances, conferences, and much more. These many architectural modalities, as well as their institutional and mediatic interfaces, or forms of dissemination, have each, in distinct ways, played important roles in the conceptualization and transformation of the discipline.

Designed to look closely and critically at these fields of practice, this colloquium will focus on three interrelated platforms: (1) publications including magazines, reports, newspapers, and books and the architects, critics, writers, and publishers associated with them; (2) exhibitions in galleries, museums, world’s fairs, expos, biennales, and triennales and the architects, curators, and institutions involved, and; (3) experimental formats of research and the collaborative arrangements and institutions through which they function. We will investigate what role these have played in the formulation and understanding of architecture and will work to identify their contribution to seminal debates, to transformations in architecture’s technical and aesthetic characteristics, to sponsoring critical experimentation, as well as to the careers of many architects. We will distinguish the different forms of expertise they manifest; ask how they function as interfaces and to what audiences; and consider whether they serve to consolidate and codify existing architectural paradigms or to forge new critical and conceptual and well as aesthetic, material, and programmatic possibilities. We will look at how various practices emerged in their specific historical context and ask to what degree did they function to maintain a status quo or to act as critical and polemical launchings. We will ask, in turn, what scope there is for pushing new formats, developing new critical concepts, opening new trajectories of investigation, and expanding the very territories of the discipline.