Call for Submissions - Pidgin Issue 20: Ageism
Register/Submit Deadline: Thursday, Jul 30, 201512:29 PMEDT
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Pidgin Magazine, the student-run journal of the Princeton University School of Architecture, is seeking submissions for its 20th issue, "Ageism."
As Simone de Beauvoir writes in The Coming of Age, how we define old age varies depending on the era and the place. Today, in the expanded Western World, we inject serums to keep our skin taut and photogenic, and we supplement our failing organs and limbs with artificial ones. We preserve by making new; we avoid change by making changes. In this culture obsessed with youth and unrelenting transformation, we are paradoxically struck by the increasing number of centenarians, whose stigmatized resilience against time reminds us that age is a fundamental determinant of a subject’s or an object’s relationship to the world.
In his advertisements for architecture from the late 1970s, Bernard Tschumi may have marketed decay and deterioration, yet architecture goes to great lengths to stay fresh-faced. Historical character is commodified, and buildings are frequently dressed in period costumes or are cryogenically frozen under historic preservation. We submit to persistent automatic updates, and we trust specialists to forecast fashion and color trends. What qualifies as history now includes the recent past; designed obsolescence has drastically reduced the lifespan of buildings; and projects are considered new only if they’re still on page 1 of the blogosphere.
In spite of all this newness, our infrastructures, our starchitects, and our modernisms are getting old. Age manifests itself in a number of ways: through material phenomena, existential questioning, and institutional frameworks, to name only a few. Can we reconcile retirement against the latest trend, ancestry against novelty, and the ruin against the twenty-something? With its twentieth issue and in its tenth year, Pidgin asks what it means to get older.
Submission guidelines can be found at www.pidginmagzine.com. Send text and images to pidgin@princeton.edu by July 30, 2015.
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