Call for Papers: Confluences

The edi­tors of AR 2019 Con­flu­ences are call­ing for papers that address the sub­ject of con­flu­ences with­in and among con­cep­tions and con­struc­tions of art, archi­tec­ture and the city.

Con­flu­ences form the con­text of expe­ri­ence. Con­flu­ence involves the inex­tri­ca­ble inter­twin­ing of arti­facts, con­cepts and per­cep­tions, with tem­po­ral­ly and phys­i­cal­ly dis­tant and prox­i­mate ori­gins, which are there­by made simul­ta­ne­ous­ly present in expe­ri­ence. Every construction—painting, build­ing, city—is fun­da­men­tal­ly a con­flu­ence (adding / graft­ing / com­bin­ing / inter­ven­ing / lam­i­nat­ing / recon­sti­tut­ing / inter­twin­ing / inter­weav­ing / lay­er­ing / inte­grat­ing / trans­lat­ing / trans­form­ing) of new arti­facts and pre-exist­ing con­cep­tu­al, spa­tial and mate­r­i­al con­texts. Con­flu­ence of the con­tem­po­rary with the lay­ers of the his­tor­i­cal (one thinks of Car­lo Scarpa’s lam­i­na­tions of ancient and local with mod­ern and uni­ver­sal in his con­struc­tions in Venice); con­flu­ence of con­cepts of space, order and per­cep­tion flow­ing from art and archi­tec­ture (one thinks of Alvar Aalto’s engage­ments in his works of George Braque’s idea of ​“tac­tile space”); con­flu­ence of the famil­iar and the unfa­mil­iar (one thinks of Ita­lo Calvino’s trans­la­tions of his city of Venice into all the cities of Kubla Khan’s empire); con­flu­ence of inti­mate and immense, pri­vate and pub­lic, domes­tic and urban (one thinks of Bern­hard Hoes­li and Col­in Rowe’s employ­ment of com­po­si­tion­al strate­gies drawn from Cubist paint­ing in urban design ped­a­gogy); con­flu­ence of ancient and mod­ern, time and place, near and far, abstract and con­crete, time­less and of its time, per­son­al insight and inspi­ra­tion and shared inher­i­tance and tradition—confluence as the mak­ing that allows all these streams to flow togeth­er so as to be simul­ta­ne­ous­ly present in experience.

– Robert McCarter, guest edi­tor AR 2019