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.
calls for articles
issue 35: borders Spring 2016
Borders are limits, dividing lines that separate one thing from another, that enclose a space to cut it off or make it whole. They can be thick (dead zones, fortifications, green belts) or thin (the lines on a drawing, the edge of a page), hard (walls and fences) or soft (the gradual fade of a cell phone signal, the city limits that can’t keep wildlife out).
walls – through Palestine, the Mexican border, Hungary’s razor wire fence, the concrete Berlin wall, the useless Maginot Line, the massive Atlantic Wall limits – of settlement, of urban conditions materiality – permeability, solidity, transparency, opacity identity – lines on political maps containment and protection – prison walls, detainment camps edges – a new look at edge city breaches – the spatiality of breaking dams, dykes, walls: imaginary boundaries overcome construction – the actual construction of fences, barriers: sections/plans/maps infrastructure – s uspension of services that defines an edge, jurisdictional differences landscape – green belts, forests, deserts border markers – airports, customs & immigration, passports & loss of, cairns, signs, checkpoints
ideas/proposal (brief outline, some idea about possible images, estimated length) due 1 January 2016
Finished pieces are due 1 February 2016
Send everything through www.onsitereview.ca/ contact-onsite The call for articles is also at www.onsitereview.ca/ callforarticles with futher links to specifications and editing policies.
For issue 36 we would like to investigate borders solid and ephemeral, permeable and impermeable; border crossings, signs, checkpoints; experiences and constructions of liminal space; questions of identity, containment and edges.
1. definition of vernacular architecture (the borrowing from linguistics, ‘the vernacular’, the lingua franca), architecture without architects revisited: Bernard Rudofsky, Paul Oliver 2. the detailed study of a vernacular: geography, geology, resources, culture, topography, materials (the deep history of a building type) 3. the value, beyond historical and cultural documentation (which are a given), of these studies to contemporary practice 4. examples where one could look at emergency housing and vernacular traditions, developer suburban housing and its vernacular roots -- all the cases where now we have ‘architecture for the people’ that has developed out of ‘architecture of the people’ 5. how vernacular traditions and building types survive, endure, resist, evolve 6. why so many smart young urban architects feel impelled to study vernacular architecture in the most un-globalised places they can find.
issue 36: vernacular Fall 2016 ideas/proposals for articles only: due 1st July 2016 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/ callforarticles
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M H: in the realm of architecture with a
actually is for the 99%. Environmentalists love the vernacular: low- cost, local renewable materials, passive energy systems. And you can read all kinds of fascinating social relationships and cultural values in the vernacular, whether it’s how ancient desert communities designed their water infrastructure, or how Victorian rowhouses are adapted by immigrant
families in Toronto’s chinatown today.
design is ‘vernacular’. In Copenhagen any proposal that engaged an urban system or a community group was deemed vernacular, despite a formalist approach to the building that came with it. S W: we want to take this theoretically unfashionable (right now) topic and give it a critical twist.
capital A, there’s been an ongoing trend to reinvent vernacular typologies (brian mackay lyons, david chipperfield), to honour traditions, to fit in with the cultural context, etc. Conversely, among those who are dismayed by the elitism of architecture, studying the vernacular gives a glimpse into what architecture
M T: I think in contemporary practice, from what I have seen, there is a real misappropriation of the term. On the west coast I hear it used to describe anything that stylistically relates to local building materials. If an interior designer exposes glulam beams her
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