April 7-10, 2021 | Tucson, Arizona | The University of Arizona
  

Keynote Addresses

Technological Performances

Research concerning the built environment’s technological performances navigates between nano and planetary scales, and interrogates methods, materials, and media; ethics and aesthetics; and efficacy, efficiency, and affect. Histories of architectural technologies reveal oscillations and cross- pollination between mechanistic and organic paradigms and range from single-issue, scientific research to more holistic, complex models. With shifts from inert to vibrant matter paradigms, both materials and material systems perform multiple functions, generating and integrating information flows, and behaving according to biological models in dialogue with humans. Ecological and socio- economic imperatives alert us to the ethics of material extraction, supply chains, by-products, and life cycles, and bring into view architecture’s myriad durational performances beyond biome-specific, seasonal adaptations.

Architects and engineers have devised technological solutions to varying environmental conditions through contextual responses and socio-cultural behaviors, as well as ones abiding by universal laws of physics. The history of energy and buildings exposes a shifting stance from the earliest place-based climate-protective structures, through strict environmental management and control, to adaptive and responsive systems. The interconnected roles of materials and spatial design greatly influence the energetic performance, as does the occupant culture. In a context of climate crises and global pandemics, the design of environments across scales with a focus on the health of diverse life-forms in our biosphere presents the possibility of catalyzing positive planetary transformation. How do we process, measure, visualize, and simulate these issues? How do the complex, technological working methodologies that represent our complex world frame technological research?

Cultural Performances

While environments may perform as places for scripted events playing out before an audience, urban sites, spaces, buildings, and landscapes have the potential to be more than mere locations; they are events in themselves. Cultural performances of environments are enacted through daily practices and recurrent rituals; they embody cultural traditions; and they challenge and transform through improvisation and agency. Mis-performed iterations, durations, dérives, and repetitions are generative. The event may, in fact, not be that which is planned, but the punctual, unscripted, and unintended irruptions that the liminal space-time of the event affords. Human and non-human performances in space are discursive in that space impresses assumed behaviors upon us even as we exert our agency to be and perform in and with space. Environments perform upon sensesmoving embodied beings, choreographically and emotively, through immersive atmospheres experienced over time. The dialogue between bodies and environments establish and evidence culture. The media, be they environments themselves, models, drawings, or films, constitute the message and the meaning. These dialogue with us, conveying ideas, social hierarchies, desires, and values. Materials translate cultural attributes and aspirations; visual and textual narratives recount (hi)stories. Building materials, spatial configurations, and representations parlay cultural conditions that reveal social values, modalities, and forms. Tactical assemblies of bodies with public spaces—protest, occupations, demonstrations, and flash-mobs—enact emerging cultural conditions. How are critical spatial performances particularly pertinent amidst augmented policing of roundabouts, boulevards, and boundaries under past, present, and future states of emergency; in a context of self-sequestering and spatial re-partitioning in response to pandemics; and in the shifting spatial practices that respond to climate crises?

Open Theme

Technological, organizational, and cultural performances span considerable scholarly terrain. However, research may reside outside this tripartite thematic framework. Rigorously researched papers are invited for consideration under the theme “open performances,” whether they expand the concept of performance above and beyond the provocations of the conference theme or address other topics pertinent to the design of built environments from the interior to the territorial.