on site 25 : identity architecture + identity
The next On Site will be issue 25. Twelve and a half years old, something like being halfway through Grade 7. No longer young, not old enough to know where you are going. So, we are going to look at identity. Do we inherit our identity or do we create it? Can identity be transplanted? Is our culture our identity, or are we all more global than that? Are there such things as invasive cultural identities? Is branding the creation of an identity where none previously existed? or, is branding the strengthening of an identity? Is it possible for architecture to be without discernable identity? Is it clearer if it is stamped with the identity of its architect? What is the relationship between ‘style’ and identity? Is identity drawn from the environment, as in ‘we are a northern people’? or is that a euphemism for something. If one can always recognise a Siza building no matter where it is, or a Burtynsky photograph no matter what it is, or a suburb no matter what city it is in – is that about identity, or is it about typology? Does identity control ways of seeing and of thinking? Is identity political?
urbanism + identity landscape + identity art + identity geography + identity culture + identity research + identity design + identity
Is globalisation and its concomitant quelling of identities such as nationalisms and theisms, successful?
After having done this issue of On Site on migration, it seems that identity is mutable, dependent on circumstance, not entirely stable. How does this affect they way we work?
As always, take the term ‘identity’ in whatever direction you want, and remember, this is a magazine about architecture and urbanism, design and landscape. Bring issues of identity to these fields.
ideas only: due 1st January 2011 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles
issue 26: dirt
Joshua Craze quoted the anthropologist Mary Douglas* in his article in this issue: ‘dirt is matter out of place’. Issue 26, for this time next year, Fall 2011, will be about dirt. and weeds.
This is a huge topic.
outsider art buildings that don’t fit in architectural pornography transgression** construction sites rammed earth, adobe and any kind of mud construction***
vigorous hybrids (often considered weeds) pollution and taboo (thank you Mary Douglas)
* Mary Douglas. Purity and Danger, An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo , 1966 ** Peter Stallybrass and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression , 1986 *** Taymore Baalba on the mud buildings of Mali, On Site 17: water , 2007
ideas only: due 1st July 2011 specs: www.onsitereview.ca/callforarticles
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