FABRICATIONS

Atmosphere 10 explores Fabrications. Fabrications implicate diverse artifacts and modes of making, together with the places, practices,

 

contingencies and intentions that enable and contextualize making. In other words, this symposium will examine not simply what, how

 

and why we make, but sites and situations of making. The aim is to explore how cultural and environmental circumstances become

 

meaningful catalysts of design, building, teaching and research. This theme encompasses manifold concerns beyond the digital:

 

complexities of urban and social fabrics; intricacies of environmental skins; potentials of building sites and workshops; as well as the

 

 stories and arguments through which we craft shared understandings of our fabricated world.

 

 

SOCIAL FABRICS

 

Society has long been conceptualized as a great tangle of human affairs in need of careful unraveling and fine re-stitching.

 

Aristophanes and Plato employed this metaphor of weaving social cohesion at a time when the experiment of democracy was becoming

 

dangerously frayed. More recently, the topos describes a city’s dense and fibrous web of interweaving events. This session seeks

 

inquiries into material configurations of social interaction and exchange. Topics may cover the intertwining of modern and historic

 

fabrics; patchworks of development; and the interlacing of shifting global cultures with indigenous ways of life.

 

 

MEDIATING FABRICS

 

Wall assemblies and finishes are increasingly conceived as scintillating surfaces and performatively enhanced skins. This session

 

probes the substantive thickness and interstitial depth of enclosures, which mediate the differences, overlaps and interactions of inner

 

and outer worlds. Papers may push this envelope by unfolding reciprocities of tectonic assemblies and social practices; by revealing

 

how industrially-produced artifacts are adjusted to specificities of place and program; and by exploring expressive attributes of wall

 

assemblies, or the so-called ‘fiction of function’ in modern architecture.

 

 

FABRICATING IN SITU

 

This session invites examination of inhabitable sites and situations of making. The aim is to study how particular places and cultural

 

circumstances serve as meaningful catalysts for fabrication, while cultivating a collective sense of place in the world. Papers may

 

explore various scales and terrains: desktops, workshops, building sites, and regional topographies. Topics may include: the agency of

 

context; the reciprocity between sites of production and sites of realization; and design-build projects enacted as collaborations of

 

makers, materials, and milieux.

 

 

FABRICATING TRUTH

 

As with any art, poetic fiction does not oppose reality, but augments and transforms it. Narrative fabrications, however fabled and

 

fabulous, can make profound aspects of the human condition more intelligible, palpable and interpretable. This session pursues truth as

 

a synthetic construct beyond mere facticity. Papers may explore the interdependent arts of storytelling and building; the productive

 

agencies of language and metaphor; epistemological fabrications bearing on how we construe and construct the human world; as well

 

as ways in which built environments participate in (re)making symbolic order.

 

 

 

Click here for the Call for Proposals.