2021 ARCC Conference
PERFORMATIVE ENVIRONMENTS
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, April 7-10, 2021

ARCC is happy to announce the call for submissions for the 2021 ARCC Conference, Performative Environments. Hosted by the University of Arizona, the conference will be held in Tucson, AZ on April 7-10, 2021.

Performative environments encompass a range of topics and scales, from building components to buildings, from urban to landscape performances, and from structural, environmental, and material systems to information networks. While technological performances of built environments may be the dominant framework through which performance has been conceptualized, architecture and built environments succeed or fail according to a broad spectrum of performance criteria including the aesthetic, social, cultural, economic, and political production and inhabitation of space. The concept of performative environments, therefore, not only posits that people create and act upon buildings, but also that the latter have agency of their own. Space performs!

The 2021 ARCC Conference will gather a broad and entangled series of presentations under three thematic umbrellas—technological, organizational, and cultural. This organization is modeled after performance studies scholar Jon McKenzie’s “rehears(ed) general theory of performance,” reinterpreted to challenge the environments: “Perform—or else.” These sub-themes also build upon many designers and scholars whose work has broken disciplinary boundaries to examine the complexities of performance in spatial culture, research, pedagogy, and/or practice.

To this end, we invite paper and poster submissions spanning the spectrum of technological, organizational, and cultural issues. Work might examine contemporary or historical research on building performance, biosensing, digital fabrication, robotics, material, or urban systems, as well as wellbeing. Papers could address or intertwine contemporary or historical matters concerning regulations and accreditation, institutional models and modes of labor, economies and ecologies of collaborating, media and means of communication, and spatial politics. Finally, papers could leverage diverse theoretical perspectives with interdisciplinary or transversal methodologies and challenge the conventional modes of presentation by making present or enacting research.

For more information about the conference themes and submission deadlines, see  attached call for submissions of visit the ARCC 2021 Website.