VAD 05. Call for Papers. The opportunities

Opportunity is a decidedly optimistic, positive word that takes us to that ideal moment in which everything is possible. Yet it also has a dark side, as it is often allied with the negative concept of crisis. This duality seems indispensable for gauging the value of an opportunity as inversely proportional to that of its opposite crisis. In this sense, VAD’s proposal could not be more relevant at a time when we face, as a society, one of the greatest and most universal crises in living memory…

Architecture offers many examples of the success of the crisis–opportunity dialectic. The crisis that Malthus’s theories might unleash leads Fuller to define ephemeralization, an opportunity to create a better and fairer world. More generally, if we accept a linear and therefore simplified view of the history of architecture over the last two centuries, we can understand its successive movements as the result of this dual mechanism. Thus the architect’s identity crisis —“expelled” from the school of fine arts and confronted with the technological revolution— can be seen as the trigger of the Modern Movement. Modernity, whose principles in turn entered into crisis during the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War, gave postmodernism the opportunity to ally architecture with neoliberalism. The architecture of the last years of the twentieth century is defined by many individual positions, as opposed to the birth of great universal causes, among which sustainability and feminism stand out.

Ruptures have often been sought at moments that called simply for necessary reflection, so strong is the impression that the definitive opportunity lies beyond them. In reality, however, any challenge to the threshold of ordinary architectural practice can make it emerge sporadically, and the architecture of the last two centuries also offers many examples of this. It was probably their meeting in Peter Behrens’s office that, years later, led Mies to invite Le Corbusier to take part in the Weissenhofsiedlung exhibition. Cedric Price’s collaboration with the theatre director Joan Littlewood on the Fun Palace also opened a new stage of multidisciplinary collaboration that has enriched architectural practice. Participatory processes, open buildings and, in general, any partnership between architects, whether or not open to transdisciplinary collaboration, can represent an opportunity for progress and transformation.

In this issue, VAD invites contributions that discuss the concept of opportunity, understood both as the event that results from it and as the propitious moment that made it possible; extending its limits, if possible, beyond the circle of us, to help us, perhaps, to discern what opportunities the present crisis holds for humanity as a whole.

Submission guidelines
See Submissions for how to submit your manuscript.

Timeline
Call opens: 2 February 2021.
Deadline for manuscripts: 30 April 2021.
The timeline is also available in Announcements.

Website
All the information at https://veredes.es/vad/.

Foreword by Beatriz Villanueva Cajide, member of the Editorial Board.