Submission deadline extended: Monday, 3 March, 2014, 5pm EST
Dates of the international seminar at CCA: 23–25 May, 2014
Research Team Workshop at CCA: Late August–Early September, 2014
Study Centre
Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920, rue Baile
Montréal, Québec
Canada H3H 2S6
The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal is launching a Multidisciplinary Research Program on the social, economic and technological shifts that took place in Britain in the period 1945–1975 and, specifically, how these transformations and reform efforts were registered through culture. The CCA invites researchers and practitioners from any relevant cultural discipline to propose lines of inquiry fitting this topic for a working seminar to be held at CCA in Montreal from 23 to 25 May, 2014. The seminar will be the first phase of an 18-month research program generously supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
This initiative is suggested in part by the CCA’s extensive holdings of works by British architect Cedric Price, whose provocative proposals during those years represent one example of how architecture might envision, and even prompt, a transformed society. The theme recognizes that the optimism and fascination with social responsibility that nourished the work of British architects after wartime devastation are valuable examples for the shaping of society today. The social-democratic stamp of those years accompanied the belief that social order and human behavior should encompass culture as well as leisure and education, issues that are emerging as priorities in contemporary society and the planning of the built environment.
Through this research program and the discussions it cultivates, the CCA hopes to establish a deeper base for contextualizing Price’s outputs. Its wider agenda, however, is to enact a new method of multidisciplinary historiography that explores the relationship between societal change and cultural production, a historiography through which architecture’s contributions to culture and interactions with other disciplines may be more meaningfully understood.
Given the project’s aim to attract participants from a variety of backgrounds, proposals could engage with architectural discourse from points of departure in other fields or investigate other issues related to culture in Britain during the period 1945–1975.
Topics and essential aspects of the seminar:
– Distinctions between high and low (or mass) culture in the context of the welfare state, and the emergence of counter-culture positions
– The emergence of new media and artistic expressions and the dissemination of ideas related to social transformation
– The development of new mechanisms or spaces for engaging in cultural or leisure activity
– Literacy and/or education and their relationship to culture
– Links between culture and advancing forms of techno-scientific knowledge
– The relationship between the reordering of culture and cultural consumption
– The standardization or individualization of culture and their relationship to economic factors
– Cultural critiques of social and economic policy
– The influence of immigration and demographic changes on the forms and content of culture
– Relationships between culture and housing, healthcare or higher education.
Applicants should submit a 500-word abstract, a short bibliography and a CV to the CCA by Monday, 3 March, 2014 at 5pm EST. Those selected to participate in the seminar will be expected to develop their proposals into working hypotheses for presentation and discussion in May.
After the seminar, the CCA will invite six participants to form a research team that will further develop the project. This research team will meet for a workshop at the CCA at the end of the summer 2014, with two additional team workshops to follow in 2015.
For further information on the seminar and the development of this research project, please visit the CCA website.
www.cca.qc.ca/en/study-centre/2307-19451975-british-culture-for-architecture
Study Centre
Canadian Centre for Architecture
1920, rue Baile
Montréal, Québec
Canada H3H 2S6
[email protected] .
