calls for articles
As always, take the themes in whatever direction you want, and remember, this is a journal about architecture and urbanism, design and landscape, about spatiality and construction. Push each theme into these fields. The deadlines are absolute.
issue 29: geology Spring 2013
The Anthropocene Era: the geological era we inhabit, hallmarked by all the changes on the earth that man hath wrought, including mining and smelting, the industrial revolution and consequent climate change. Despite the technology that allowed such changes, we are still unable to cope with geologic incidents: earthquakes and the tsunamis they often cause, landslides, the toxicity of the materials we release from the matrix of the globe, desertification. While a kind of avaricious human history has made these incidents generally fatal to humans, much effort is expended in combatting them – from the massively fortified levees now in place around New Orleans to snowsheds in the Rockies to carbon storage sites, and in explaining them – from the program of highway stops in Norway that explain geological phenomena, to contentious interpretive centres on the Columbia Ice Fields. And there are books, from Smudge Studio’s Geologic City: A Field Guide to the Geoarchitecture of New York that views New York, from its taxis to its road salt, through a geologic prism, to Eyles and Miall’s Canada Rocks: the Geologic Journey which explains much about how and why settlement located itself in particular geologic landscapes, to Kastner and Wallis, Land and Environmental Art . Two investigative groups, Land Arts of the American West and Friends of the Pleistocene have active programmes that document test sites, nuclear waste storage sites, water management systems and the often banal, sometimes heroic, traces of their existance. For issue 29:GEOLOGY, we would like to go into the processes and products that serve as the bedrock to architecture and urbanism. There are theoretical positions on all of this, there is also the experience of practicing architecture and dealing with materials and their sourcing, supply, world markets, transportation, durability and sustainability. Ground conditions: bedrock or no, have an enormous influence on form, cost and structure. Tim Oke, from the geography department at UBC, once wrote about cities as very rough, spikey pieces of terrain that influence weather and consequently climate. A house is as big as a glacial erratic, a city is as large as a glaciated mountain – where does geology rub up against architecture and urbanism? Give us your thoughts, your experiences, your projects, your construction details. What is good design? Who decides, and who is design actually for? Architecture and cities: both are used, occupied, loved, hated, and ultimately adapted by people very distant from original design processes. Thomas-Bernard Kenniff has pointed out that the discussion of ‘ethics and publics’ is relevant to both recent discourse and practice given the sort of ‘ethical turn’ in architecture of the last 15 or so years. He cites relational aesthetics, assemblage theory, actor network theory and dialogism as the theoretical underpinning to such discussions. We would add Eyal Weizman’s work to this topic. More generally, we are interested in what it means to intervene significantly into the lives and the environments of others. We want examples. What is this alleged turn to ethical architecture? What constitutes an ethical urbanism, and whose ethics are they? And who are our publics: must we know and understand them, or are they an abstract genre of users? Is our obligation to the here and now, or to the future? On Site review is called On Site because we are interested in projects, events and situations on site, i.e. not just on paper or as text. This issue could be very theoretical, but we want to bring the theory to built work. Your work.
ideas/proposals for articles only: due 1st January 2013 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles
erratum
In last issue’s On Site review 27: rural urbanism , we failed to acknowledge that the text for the call for articles for issue 29 was taken from ‘final draft –Introduction: Geologic Turn as Emergent Cultural Phenomenon’, part of a forthcoming book by Elizabeth Ellsworth and Jamie Kruse. Making the Geologic Now: Responses to Material Conditions of Contemporary Life. Brooklyn, NY: Punctum Books, 2012
issue 30: ethics and
publ ics Fall 2013
51
ideas/proposals for articles only: due 1st July 2013 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator