University of Tasmania, Australia

The Conference will comprise broad thematic sessions and open sessions:

Places

In Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, Jorgensen’s fabulation of Sarah Island reconstructed the small penal colony as an elaborate microcosm of the imperial setting in which it was situated.  This session invites papers that explore contextual specificity – locally and within wider networks of architectural production – including: issues relating to colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, regionalism, globalisation; real and imagined geographies; cross-cultural exchanges in architectural practice, criticism, and history; indigenous nations, agency in colonial constructions, post-colonial appropriations and decolonising imperatives in landscapes, cities, buildings, interiors and pictorial representations; suburbs and suburban peripheries; migration, mobility and architecture and spatial imaginings in visual arts.

Poetics

Architectural history may be understood to have it own poetic encompassing inherited theories, imperatives, practices and aesthetics, which this session seeks to explore.  Poetics entails modes of engaging with the historical record, as well as speaking and writing practices connected to the cultivation of specific kinds of audiences and developed in the various forms of architectural histories (treatises, manuals, dictionaries, encyclopaedias, taxonomies, anthologies, monographs, guidebooks, lectures and architectural history courses), as well as the rethinking of architectural historiography. How do these works acquire their persuasive power?  Poetics may also be understood as a linguistic practice connected to architectural representation other histories of architecture and cities – oral, fictive, and so on. This session welcomes papers that reflect upon the practices and aesthetics of architectural history. 

Absences

The construction of architectural histories must engage gaps, known and unknown, in the historical record. Many histories relating to our region (and beyond) remain untold.  This session thus invites contributions that open up new fields of knowledge; document that which is not yet known; and/or explore new frameworks and methodological approaches to the understanding of historical material – all of which expands the knowledge base of our discipline and our capacity to interpret it.

Myth

This session seeks to explore the thresholds of the historical imagination and the inherited myths, (stories and fabulations) in and of architectural history.  What are the various forms and languages of myth-making?  Who are the audiences and stakeholders for constructing and progressing fictions, and stories of ideal pasts, presents or futures - utopias and dystopias? What are the technics and mechanics of remembering and forgetting in architecture and architectural history?  What are the potential implications of mainstream fictionalisations of histories for architecture?  This session invites papers that reflect upon the fabulations promulgated through architectural artefacts and discourses.

Nature

When Hobart hosted the 10th National Convention of the RAIA (1960), Tasmanian Architect decried the spread of a technocratic modernism, asserting that in Tasmania “[t]he disease will find more natural enemies … in that here, we have raw, masculine nature at both our front and back doors”, and called for regionalist responses.  More generally, nature has variously provided romantic, rationalist, poetic and ethical framings for urban design, architecture and architectural history.  It has also been invoked as evidence to both support and challenge myth-making in architecture and architectural history.  This session seeks papers that examine the realities, myths (and fabulations) of nature/culture inter-relationships, operating across time, place and scales of the built environments, from region to object.

Heritage

This session explores critical practices and theories in heritage practice and management. It invites papers that address issues of authenticity in rebuilding and reconstruction; future-oriented adaptive re-use; heritage as an urban and inclusive practice which engages and admits dominant and dissonant buildings, sites, and traces; the power, potency and problems of twentieth century heritage; and the dilemmas of architecture in environments of high-value natural heritage.  Papers that explore the theme of heritage either through the explication of individual case studies or through the wider context of heritage practice and/or theory are encouraged.

Pugin

2012 is the bi-centennial year of the birth of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, England’s most influential early-Victorian designer and theorist. In 1888, less than four decades after Pugin’s death, John Dando Sedding, a leading Arts and Crafts architect of his time, could write that: “We should have had no Morris, no Street, no Burges, no Webb, no Bodley, no Rossetti, no Burne-Jones, no Crane, but for Pugin”, citing a galaxy of English stars in the fields of architecture and the applied arts. This session invites papers that offer fresh insights into Pugin and his influence, particularly his embrace of a gesamtkunstwerk approach to his labours.  More widely, Pugin’s writings and designs, prompted a culture of Victorian innovation; advanced the power of the visual rhetoric as means of storytelling about the moralities of an imagined past; conceptualized the ideal city as a spiritual rather than a commercial enterprise; and marked the emergence of the rationalisation of form and detail (mass and ornament).  Papers that consider these wider implications and speculate upon the fabulations of Pugin’s influence, 200 years on, are also welcome.

Open

In addition to the themed sessions above, SAHANZ 2012 invites papers on new and current research for open sessions.