I have announced this over at the Netlab site, but I wanted to make sure that the readers of this blog had a chance to see it as well. I’ll be blogging about the topic a bit throughout the summer and into next year, so stayed tuned for more.
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The Network Architecture Lab and Domus announce Networked Publics: Publish, an open call for submissions to a new collaborative publication.
During the last fifteen years architecture and the media have been turned on their head as technologies of production and communication integrated into our daily lives. But instead of the delirious optimism of the last decade, we now also face panic and crisis. The media industry is in flux: as new media rise, old ones are victims of creative destruction. The tools of architectural production, meanwhile, have been thoroughly transformed; yet thanks to technological and legal innovations that made possible the securitization of buildings, architecture faces its greatest economic crisis since the Depression. If we can be certain of anything, it’s that as Karl Marx wrote, "all that is solid melts into air."
We invite brief submissions (under 1,500 words) addressing the consequences of these changes for the architectural community. What are the transformations taking place in the architectural profession, in architectural media, in criticism? How are these transformations interconnected? What do these mean to you? What do they mean to the future of architecture and cities?
We are keenly aware that it is the engagement with precisely these epochal transformations that will define the critical output of our generation, and that the legacy of the previous generation of critics and theorists is no longer able to deliver the kind of thinking necessary to help us address and catalyze these conditions. This publication is intended as forum for debate through which the accepted understanding of the word ‘publication’ itself can be challenged, redefined, dismantled and rebuilt. It will polemically frame our context, but it will also constitute a toolbox of ideas that outlines an agenda for criticism in network culture.
Domus, one of the earliest and historically most influential architecture magazines, sets itself as a case study for debate around the role of printed magazines in the contemporary era. If the magazine is no longer spontaneously embraced as a locus for debate, should the permanence of printed matter induce it to serve as a historical register for ideas developed elsewhere, e.g. on the Web (the magazine understood as an archive-in-progress of excellence)? Or, conversely, should it pursue agility, hybridizing across platforms? Does the notion of architectural criticism, understood in conventional terms, bear any relevance today? What forces designate the formal and conceptual frameworks of contemporary built architecture?
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There are three ways to submit.
The first way is to send in an abstract by 12 noon, EST June 24 pitching an article on the topic. This should be one brief paragraph on what you would like to write about although if you are inspired enough to submit your entry in full, you may also do so at this time.
An editorial team will meet to review submissions and send feedback to contributors on the 24th. At this meeting we will also discuss the gaps in the publication and post a call for submissions that specifically address such topics. A second way to submit an article is to respond to this call. Abstracts for projects responding to the call for submissions are due on July 2.
Final work for both submission tracks will be due on July 15.
A third way to submit is to join a conversation over the Internet by tagging a blog or twitter post #netdomus.
The publication will be available for free download at Domus’s Web site. A launch event will be held at Columbia’s Studio-X at the end of the summer but this conversation—and publication—will continue for some time to come.
Contributors may find potential references in
Networked Publics, a book published by MIT Press in 2008 and produced in collaboration with the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication to examine how the social and cultural shifts centering around new technologies have transformed our relationships to (and definitions of) place, culture, politics, and infrastructure. This spring, the Netlab hosted “
Discussions on Networked Publics” at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation’s Studio-X Soho facility, exploring the ramifications of these changes to architecture and cities through a set of four panels—culture, place, politics, and infrastructure. Discussions were recorded and are available
here.
Please submit your proposals
here.
Read more
