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.
“Edification has two principal meanings—to build and to be morally uplifting… That is, edification must be ethical, entailing communication of value choices. In the present situation…the only possibility of edifying in the sense of building is to edify in the sense of ‘rendering ethical,’ that is, to encourage an ethical life: to work with recollections of traditions, with traces of the past, with expectations of meaning for the future.”
Gianni Vattimo
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.
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.
– Robert McCarter, guest editor AR 2019