VAD 07. Call for Papers. The periphery

“Everyone knows that myths never really happened, but they are always happening. They now continue not only through the adventures of ancient heroes, but also make their way into the ubiquitous and most popular stories of contemporary movies, games, and literature.”

Olga Tokarczuk, “The Tender Narrator.” The Nobel Prize in Literature. 2019.

In December 2019, Olga Tokarczuk, a Polish writer and 2018 Nobel Prize winner for Literature, focused her speech before the Swedish Academy on tenderness as a way of looking at our world since, according to the writer, tenderness has the ability to show it to us

“as alive, interconnected, cooperating and codependent on itself”.

Throughout his emotional speech, he insists on the importance of working on what is not easily classifiable, what is found in the margins; and in the need for languages, metaphors, fables and myths that help us explore everything that unites and links us through time and geographies.

Somehow, and bridging the gap, Tokarczuk points out some of the problems that also affect architects today, such as the necessary understanding of the breadth of the disciplinary scope of architecture, knowledge of the evolution or transformation of said field through time and geography, and the reworking of the narrative of our collective past, present and future from a contemporary perspective.

The understanding of the breadth of the disciplinary field is as necessary today as it has always been, although perhaps we are currently somewhat more sensitive to it. The tasks, pre and post project, or parallel to the project, are also professional tasks. Many architects and architects project our environment from the political sphere promoting laws, decrees, regulations, plans and ordinances. Since the administration, many people have worked for a long time so that a piece of land is qualified as a building site or not. Sites that have a socio-economic context that has been previously decided by many other people, not to mention the habitability regulations that condition and encourage the design possibilities of the buildings. Lotte Stam Beese and the reconstruction of neighborhoods in Rotterdam after the Second World War, as well as Jakoba Mulder and Aldo Van Eyck with their playgrounds in Amsterdam are examples of this. Or Eva Kail, more recently in Vienna,, incorporating the gender perspective in the administration of the city council and promoting what is now known worldwide as the Vienna model.

Also an essential task is the architectural criticism exercised by publishers who have helped to achieve the objectives at all times, as Monica Pidgeon and Barbara Goldstein already did from the pages of AD Architectural Design magazine promoting the work of Archigram, R Buckminster Fuller or Team 4 in the 70s, among many others. Or the critical task carried out by artists, some of them trained in Schools of Architecture, such as the work of Gordon Matta-Clark with his Anarchitecture or Sheila Levrant de Bretteville who, together with the feminist architect Dolores Hayden, carried out in Los Angeles on monument to Biddy Mason, the first free black woman in the US who would found the first public nursery in the city. Or the task of criticism and dissemination carried out by Susana Torre by promoting the creation of the Archive of Women in Architecture and the subsequent exhibition Women in American Architecture: A Historic and Contemporary Perspective, in the 1970s.

So far regarding architects and architects practicing as such, even if it is on the margins. But we must also incorporate into the discussion all those people trained as architects, even if they have developed their work in other fields, such as Roger Waters and Nick Mason, members of Pink Floyd; or fashion designers, like Tom Ford; or film directors like Gian Franco Corsi Zeffirelli or Colomo; or actors, like Anthony Quinn -who studied with Wright at Taliesin- or James Stewart -who studied architecture at Princeton.

In this context, this issue of the VAD magazine, under the slogan The periphery, calls for reflections, articles and experiences that open our eyes to what.

“it is always happening”

but whose echo has been lost in the noise that surrounds us and that, usually, official architecture has been relegating to the margins.

Submissions rules.
Check the SUBMISSIONS section to find out the procedure to follow to send the documentation.

Calendar.
Opening reception of articles: February 1, 2022.
Deadline for receipt of articles: April 30, 2022.
You can check the calendar in the ANNOUNCEMENT section.

Web.
All the information web.

Prologue by Eva Álvarez Isidro.