•When: June 3-4, 2011
•Where: London, UK
•Deadline: January 31,2011

Poetry and archi­tec­ture, brought together by Gas­ton Bachelard in his sem­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion of lived-in space, are art-forms that nev­er­the­less con­tinue crit­i­cally to be con­sid­ered broadly apart from one another. The one con­crete and three-dimensional, the other abstract and metaphor­i­cal, these two cre­ative art forms invite fur­ther com­par­i­son. Philoso­phers and the­o­rists have often used archi­tec­tural metaphors in their writ­ing – Freud, con­sid­er­ing the canny (heim­lich) as a cage that represses the uncanny (unheim­lich); Bataille using archi­tec­ture to rep­re­sent author­ity and social order, that might be attacked and under­mined by the destruc­tive act of the indi­vid­ual; or Lyotard, pro­claim­ing that ‘the tem­po­ral regime of the domus is rhythm or rhyme’.

This con­fer­ence seeks to re-assess such analy­ses, pre­sent­ing an inno­v­a­tive approach to crit­i­cal the­ory and engag­ing with Bachelard on the level of rit­ual and hermeneu­tics. Con­cepts of beauty and util­ity, of per­son­al­ity and index­i­cal­ity, of inscrip­tion and graf­fiti and of mem­ory and tem­po­ral­ity are all key con­cerns in the inves­ti­ga­tion of how these two dis­tinct dis­ci­plines pro­duc­tively engage with one another. Not lim­ited to stud­ies in moder­nity, or to the west­ern tra­di­tion, we hope to inves­ti­gate inter­sec­tions between archi­tec­ture and poetry across the widest pos­si­ble range of peri­ods and regions. In addi­tion to research-led papers, we would also wel­come pro­pos­als from archi­tects and poets.

Issues addressed might include, but are not lim­ited to:

•Archi­tects writ­ing poetry, poets writ­ing about architecture
•The struc­tural affini­ties between archi­tec­tural and lin­guis­tic creation
•Ephemer­al­ity and permanence
•The prob­lem of rep­re­sen­ta­tion ver­sus spa­tial­ity, the con­crete ver­sus the abstract
•Prob­lema­tis­ing the cat­e­gories of ‘poetic’ and ‘architectural’
•Transna­tion­al­ism and lin­gual or aes­thetic translations
•Nos­tal­gia and heritage
•Scale and the modular
•The encod­ing, enshrin­ing or mark­ing of experience
•Inscrip­tions and the imag­ing of text
Pro­pos­als of no more than 250 words for 20-minute papers should be sub­mit­ted to the organ­is­ers no later than 31 Jan­u­ary 2011.

Organ­is­ers: Ayla Lepine([email protected]) and Car­o­line Levitt ([email protected])




www.courtauld.ac.uk/researchforum/events/2010/summer/feb11_ArchitecturePoetry.shtml