coming issues call for articles
On Site review comes out twice a year. Each issue’s call for articles is announced here, 6 months before the next issue comes out. The proposal deadlines are January 1 for the Spring issue and July 1 for the Fall issue. Six weeks after the proposals have been reviewed, the final articles are due, with all the images, credits, permissions and footnotes.
We have specs, we have guidelines. They can be seen at www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles.
issue 30: ethics and publics fall 2013
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 July 2013 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles
See Thomas-Bernard Kenniff’s full call for articles at www.onsitereview.ca/call for articles
On Site review has always had a phobia about architectural photography: those wide-angle shots that make buildings look impossibly dynamic, all thrust and soar, so we ask our contributors to take their own photos of whatever they are talking about, presenting the world as they find it as designers . Early Canadian Architect covers from the 1960s were all drawn and the inside pages are mostly drawings and diagrams. Now, in most architectural magazines, you mostly see photographs; drawing is a CAD file and the hand is absent. When Jack Diamond published a book of his travel sketches – hand, pencil, watercolour, there was a sense that photography is not trusted as much as the drawing, yet there have never been more photographic images in circulation. Now that everyone has a camera in their pocket, everything is potentially a photo- documentary. With issues about representation, about authenticity, about instrumentality, are photographers gatekeepers, interpreters or simply recording instruments? Is there such a thing as raw data; should there be such a thing? Maps have always been particularly coded descriptions of the world: who owns it, who claims it, who names it, what is important to know about it. Peter Jackson’s Maps of Meaning , published in 1989, was a revelation: one cannot trust that maps have anything to do with ‘truth’ but instead are drawings of world views. Since then, the term ‘mapping’ has come to describe almost any kind of information array. Because architects and urbanists have long used drawings as the texts of their trade, we would like to look at maps in a very wide sense: we can read a plan and section as we read a map: a diagram of a set of relationships, sometimes structural, sometimes geographic, sometimes social. And city plans, although they bear a resemblance to maps, are often merely diagrams of intention, loosely laid onto a topography. Should we give up the term drawing and replace it with mapping ? Are they the same?
issue 31: photography cartography maps and pics spring 2014
ideas/proposals for articles only: due 1st January 2013 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles
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Thus, On Site 31 , on the transmission of information through image, rather than text.
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