Historiographies of Technology and Architecture

  • The 35th Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand

SAHANZ is an international peer-reviewed conference that explores themes in architectural history and theory. The theme for the 2018 conference is “Historiographies of Technology and Architecture.” The privileging of technology within architecture had its most obvious manifestation in the modernist period, when architects borrowed knowledge, practices and imagery from other technical fields. But the projection of architecture as technology has been ever present and has its own deep history. The Greek root “tekhnē” – meaning “art” or “craft” – reminds us that conceiving and making are inextricably linked. This dependency suggests that “tekhnē” lies at the core of architectural practice: the task of creating architecture has always been subject to modes of representation and analysis that can be thought of as “technical”. Equally, the discipline of architecture is responsive to changes in manufacturing, engineering and the other applied sciences. Frequently, this reflexiveness is mediated by the social changes that are wrought by these new technologies.

SAHANZ18 calls for investigations into the changing manifestations of this relationship. This conference welcomes papers exploring historiographies of architecture and technology considered within the global context. We are particularly interested in papers examining the deployment of architecture as a technology of colonization and resistance in Asia and the Pacific. However, the term will be interpreted widely to include not just technologies in the structural and environmental sense, but also:

  • Technology, indigeneity and the vernacular
  • Cross-cultural transfer of technology
  • Sustainable and ethical technologies
  • Individual architects and their preferred technologies
  • Future technologies 
  • Histories and theories of architectural representation
  • Technology and heritage practices
  • Oppositions to technology

ABSTRACT SUBMISSION

Submit your abstract of no more than 300 words to the following address1.

Abstracts will be blind reviewed by at least two members of the Conference Academic Committee. Full papers (4500 words, including notes) will be double blind peer reviewed and those accepted for presentation at the conference will be published on the conference website, with downloadable editions of the full conference proceedings available after the conference.

For inclusion in the proceedings, a paper must be presented at the conference. Authors may only present one paper as a sole author, although they may present an additional paper as a co-author. 

Work submitted for review and for publication in the conference proceedings should be original research that has not previously been published elsewhere, or work that has undergone substantial development from a prior publication.

  • 1. https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=sahanz18