The 2023 Interior Provocations Symposium: Upkeep will be hosted jointly by California College of the Arts and Pratt Institute in San Francisco on April 1, 2023. The symposium will explore issues of repair, maintenance, sustenance, and adaptation through this year’s theme: Upkeep. We accept and acknowledge the critical work of upkeeping the built environment, sustaining our histories and cultures, and maintaining our shared resources. We recognize the ways in which the interior has defined, reinforced, hidden, and protected servitude and repair. We appreciate the role of interiors to extend the lives of our architectures and design for persistent adaptation of spaces and the human interactions they sustain. Interior Provocations Upkeep seeks new discourse centered on the evolution and transformation of cultural narratives, adaptive reuse, and historical revelation. We seek forward-thinking and wide-ranging interpretations of this theme and welcome papers that explore these questions in history, theory and praxis, across time, culture and place.

The broadly outlined theme reflects the interest in wide-ranging interpretation. The conference encourages provocative and boundary-expanding proposals from design practitioners, historians, and theorists that challenge traditional assumptions and investigate overlooked parameters or influences.