As Vincent Scully wrote in 1996, “‘When you wish upon a star your dream comes true’ makes a lovely fiction for a while, especially when it is sung in front of Cinderella Castle with the magic animals capering about, but it is, after all, pure bullshit in the long run. When you wish upon a star you die like everybody else.”   

During the 20th century, intense architectural speculation imagined a myriad of new worlds as encounters with other times, people and places, often drawing heavily on received notions about the past and future. From the nostalgic confections of theme parks to the futuristic fantasies of walking cities and one-mile-high skyscrapers, architects have long played a central role in such inventive world-building.  

In the context of the fantastic architectural encounter, this session welcomes papers that examine built and unbuilt proposals which projected new architectures based upon imagined cultural intersections, encounters and exchanges: the strange and often hybrid structures that appropriated ideas and images from other cultures or imagined past and future worlds, recombined at will. Papers are encouraged to interpret the topic broadly, but focus on tangible case studies to address questions such as: In what ways were architects playing ‘fast and loose’ with history in service of the future? How were these operations intended as a form of cultural trade or exchange? And to what extent did such visions became vectors of imposition or appropriation? 

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• Session convenors: Ashley Paine, ATCH Research Centre, School of Architecture, University of Queensland, and Joss Kiely, DAAP, University of Cincinnati 
• Submit paper proposals to: [email protected]