CALL FOR ABSTRACTS CLOSES: 20 July 2009

TARGET GROUP: Professionals and academics of architecture, planning, design as well as the social sciences and humanities debating the question of architectural knowledge.

ORGANIZERS: Department of Architecture Theory, RWTH Aachen University, Germany (Susanne Schindler, Axel Sowa, Ariane Wilson)

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: Sophie Houdart (Paris), Ingeborg Rocker (Cambridge, MA), Pier-Vittorio Aureli (Rotterdam), Jane Rendell (London)

November 2009 will mark the launch of CANDIDE. Journal for Architectural Knowledge, a new peer-reviewed German-English language journal published by the Department of Architecture Theory, Faculty of Architecture at RWTH Aachen University. Not unlike Voltaire’s fictional character Candide, who travelled the eighteenth-century world on an eager but often disappointed search for knowledge, the journal’s editors have embarked on a twenty-first century search, in their case, of architectural knowledge. To celebrate the first issue of CANDIDE, the editors are organizing a two-day, international conference.

The conference, like the journal, has two main goals:

First, CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE / DAS WISSEN DER ARCHITEKTUR will discuss the types of knowledge specific to architecture. What is architectural knowledge? How is it generated or how is it found, evaluated and passed on? What is the relationship between implicit (and not easily articulated) and explicit (and readily quantifiable) knowledge? An underlying goal is to address a pressing issue in architecture academia today: if research is the process by which new knowledge is generated, what methods are acceptable? Need they be “scientific” or might fictional practices be just as meaningful to architecture?

Second, the conference will test the hypothesis that different formats are necessary to access and communicate the spectrum of knowledge being generated in architecture. Accordingly, CONSTRUCTING KNOWLEDGE / DAS WISSEN DER ARCHITEKTUR seeks examples of ways to generate and write about, represent and communicate architectural knowledge. Besides historic forms of treatises and handbooks, various forms of print- and online media, frequently making use of fictional genres, are staking out a claim to generating architectural knowledge.

For more information and to download the Call for Papers and a description of CANDIDE, see: http://theorie.arch.rwth-aachen.de