Architecture in an Expanded Field Symposium

The Architecture+Women•NZ Symposium 2013 is called 'Architecture in an Expanded Field' and covers the many creative disciplines that architectural training and research can lead into, and be included in architectural practice. The boundaries of what constitutes architecture, and a career in architecture, are constantly being tested, with crossover categories between disciplines occurring often.

Architecture can be seen as a mobile discipline operating on the edges of other barely contained fields; architecture absorbs and is absorbed into film, fashion, art practices, engineering and writing. There are many women architects who operate in these productive margins of architecture, possibly because the traditional career path is often broken (for academic, travel, health, family reasons) and then re-stitched in non-traditional ways.

The Symposium Architecture in an Expanded Field will examine the many expanded fields in practices around the country and the world today and how the participation of women in these areas of architecture have a productive and positive impact on the wider profession today.

Full Day Registration: 60 CPD Points, or 10 CPD Points for each Keynote speaker

Read a review of the event here.

Speakers: Expanded Fields and Architecture

Keynote 01: Justine Clarke

Keynote 02: Yui Tezuka

Sue Gallagher performance and architecture

Kathy Waghorn place and architecture

Keri Whaitiri film and architecture

Jacqui Chan jewellery and architecture

Jane Matthews heritage and architecture

Sue Evans planning and architecture

Emma Morris teaching and architecture

Kate Linzey fine arts and architecture

Rachel Carley ceramics and architecture

Contact Info: Charissa Snijders [email protected]

Justine Clark is an architecture editor, writer, critic and researcher. Educated at the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington, she is a former editor of Architecture Australia. She is also a honorary senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne. With Naomi Stead, Karen Burns, Sandra Kaji-O’Grady, Julie Willis, Amanda Roan, Gillian Whitehouse and Susan Savage, she is a chief investigator on the Australian Research Council-funded project Equity and Diversity in the Australian Architecture Profession: Women, Work, and Leadership. She is the editor of Parlour: women, equity, architecture, and recently began writing architectural criticism for The Age.

Yui Tezuka, working alongside husband and business partner Takaharu Tezuka, has a growing international reputation for an inventive and often charming approach to design. Rather than the attenuated materiality or structural gymnastics that characterize much contemporary Japanese architecture, Tokyo-based Tezuka Architects have become known for refreshingly unconventional buildings that create flexible, open living spaces on the constrained sites that typify Japanese cities. Their suburban houses and apartment buildings combine new sensibilities and traditional values – in the Roof House (2001), each room in the house is expanded through access to a series of casual living areas on the roof. In recent years, award-winning public projects such as Fuji Kindergarten (2007) and Woods of Net (2009) have demonstrated the Tezuka’s ability to exercise their originality at a larger scale. Yui and Takaharu have been appointed the University of Auckland's International Architects-in-Residence for 2013.

Provocation Dr Sarah Treadwell

Background: In her influential essay ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’[1], Rosalind Krauss discusses the condition of sculpture in relationship to the idea of an expanded field. In light of new work that was then testing the boundaries of sculpture she pointed to existing disciplinary tendencies to absorb and diminish newness by claiming historical precedence, or constructing lineages with the already understood. Krauss pointed out that, nevertheless, by the mid twentieth century sculpture had expanded its field past the point where such accommodation was tenable. Sculpture certainly still had its own internal logic but the rules of logic had become increasingly mutable leading to crossover categories between disciplines.

Proposal: This provocation proposes a similar expansion of the architectural field. Landscape/architecture projects join new installation and art works, cityscapes and contemporary projects that don’t necessarily involve the design of building. Architecture, like sculpture, is seen, in this proposal, as a mobile discipline operating on the edges of other barely contained fields; architecture absorbs and is absorbed into film, fashion, art practices, engineering and writing.

The notion of a discipline that acknowledges its own strong rules of logic but that also recognizes and responds to social, economic and cultural shifts is a premise that might be appreciated by the many women architects who operate on the productive margins of architecture. In practices that address architecture through interiority, fashion, film, jewelry, performance, planning, engineering, landscape and urban space, architectural work productively occurs.

Changes to the nature of architectural practice are inevitable and necessary given the ongoing social, economic, ethical and technical fluctuations taking place globally. It is an issue for all architects to consider “how architecture’s boundaries can be exceeded or subverted in order to develop new forms of architecture and architectural practice as well as new understandings of architecture and the role architecture could play”[2].

This provocation asks speakers to consider the expanded field of their own practice and reflect upon the changes, productive and otherwise, that their other practices inflect, project, and expand into architecture. These reflections could productively include references to specific projects, practices theoretical perspectives and objects as well as the effects of these shifts in both their professional and personal lives.

[1] See the recent call for papers for the 10th international conference of the Architectural Humanities Research Association. http://www1.uwe.ac.uk/et/research/transgression

[2] Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’, October, vol. 8 (Spring, 1979), pp. 30-44.