STRUCTURAL INSTABILITY - History, Environment, and Risk in Architecture

Department of Architecture, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania
April 5-7, 2018

Abstracts due November 15, 2017

Architecture, broadly considered as the intentional design of the built environment, is an important symbolic and material aspect of this structural instability. Operating at the nexus of processes of financialization, material metabolisms, and urban organization, the work of design mediates these conditions and contributes to our understanding of them. The seemingly unpredictable relationship between social practices and planetary systems also has a rich history, as do the conditions of social inequity that environmental pressures continue to intensify. By framing this symposium through architecture, the intent is to emphasize the intensity and indeterminacy of how economies and ecologies interconnect.

This symposium is interested in understanding instability as a theme in architectural, urban, and environmental histories and theories. We aim to explore how the structural instabilities of the 21st century are legible in histories of architecture and related spatio-political disciplines, insofar as they engage questions of economy, race, gender, and environmental

change. Scholarly explorations around these terms have necessarily been interdisciplinary, and abstracts are welcome from any field.

The symposium aims to elicit historical, methodological, and theoretical discussions. Papers can address any temporal or regional scope, including the challenges of contemporary spatial practices. 

More information at the Structural Instability website.