"No one sees the Earth globally."
Or: "A crowded place of risk and unwanted consequences."1

The universal – specific opposition has been central to epistemological debates and methodological shifts within the history of most (if not all) scientific disciplines. An equivalent dualism confronts artists and architects addressing a wide audience and/or planning and realizing transformative or critical interventions that involve both local factors and a range of far-reaching political, social or economic constellations and processes. This conference is an experiment, in that it sets out to connect a range of different perspectives on conflicts between universals and specific phenomena.

The universal – specific opposition has historically concerned the relation between so-called “natural“ laws or “typical“ properties and individual subjects, objects, sites, and situations. Changing ways to deal with conflicts between the universal and the particular have shaped the history of scientific representation and the one of “objectivity“ as a concept. Thus, examining how the universal – specific dichotomy is addressed within individual disciplines is one way of tracing their development over time. Recently, philosophy of science has challenged us to refute the idea of a distanced viewpoint from which we see things (no matter of which consistency or scale and in which setting) as wholes and as independent from our own actions and interests. We have been taught that we need to consider not only scientific observations, but also abstracting concepts and models as resulting from processes of interaction and montage – as compounds, assemblages, compositions. Within art and architectural history, discussions about the universal and the specific often regard the entanglement between artistic and scientific strategies of representation. Or they address moments of intended or unforeseen collision between an artistic or architectural masterplan, a system of rules or an abstract model and the particularities of specific places, materials, subjects and situations. In various scientific disciplines, “global“ stands for such properties, variables and phenomena that are understood as independent from specific environments and as applying to a system as a whole. In its critical usage, the term points to generalizations and a neglect of differences. This conference will study (and proposes to challenge) the universal – specific dichotomy and its variations. It aims to explore historical and emergent approaches to the crucial question of how to navigate between global models and particular encounters.

A conference organized by: Doctoral Program "ProDoc Art & Science" 
Funded by: Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF)
Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung, History of Art and Architecture, ETH Zurich
Prof. Dr. Bernd Nicolai, History of Architecture and Preservation, University of Berne
Prof. Dr. Dario Gamboni, History of Art and Architecture, University of Geneva
Prof. Dr. Vincent Barras, History of Medicine, University of Lausanne
Prof. Dr. Victor Stoichita, History of modern and contemporary Art, University of Fribourg

Contact
Dr. Nina Zschocke (concept & organization): 
ETH Zurich, Department of Architecture, Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture
W-Pauli-Str. 15, CH-8093 Zurich, Email: nina.zschocke (at) gta.arch.ethz.ch

• 1.  Latour, B.: Waiting for Gaia. Composing the common world through the arts and politics. 2011, http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/446, p.6,9.