European Architectural History Network Conference - call for paper proposals and/or roundtables

The European Architectural History Network Conference will be hosted in Edinburgh on 10-13 June 2020. One of the sessions "Cultivating the Child Eye's view" is particularly interested in the transfers between architectural education, learning theories and child development studies.

Proposals for papers and/or roundtables are due before 20 September 2020

For more information click on the following links:

https://eahn2020.eca.ed.ac.uk/call-papers-2/

https://eahn2020.eca.ed.ac.uk/papers/

The way that society thinks about children has undergone paradigmatic shifts in the last century. The child has been represented in many ways: as the helpless, the innocent, the savage, the primitive, the unprejudiced, and the source of unfettered creativity, the latter being a romantic construct praising the child as the ‘creative artist’ of all sorts. In this session we ask how concepts of childhood have affected architectural education. The idea of spatial and building play for children opens the wider question of what architectural education is, if it is not merely professional training. What does the education of architects share and not share with the education of children and the kinds of adults and citizens we wish them to become through personal awareness of their built environment.

Philippe Ariès’s pioneering, yet controversial study Centuries of Childhood (1962) and the advent of postmodern and psychoanalytic approaches in academic studies in beginning of the 1970s have turned critical attention to the socio-cultural and material constructions of childhood. Toys, miniatures, games, but also environments such as playgrounds, and the architecture of schools and kindergartens have been considered as the sites where pedagogical, political, economic and aesthetic interests collided. This session not so much explores the material culture of childhood or designs made for children, but rather seeks to unravel how the concept of childhood and a set of related terms such as development, growth, child experience, plasticity, impulse and play, but also negative connotations such as infantility and childishness are woven into the fabric of post-war architecture culture. Thus we ask how did new interest in children and designing for them in the later Twentieth century affect the education of architects, and, reposition the built environment in familial and civic life.

We are particularly interested in the transfers between architectural education, learning theories and child development studies. Papers may trace design strategies often used in the postwar architectural studio (think of creative play, the innocent eye, unlearning,…) back to the educational reform theories of for instance John Dewey, Herbert Read and Jean Piaget. To illustrate this, the émigré architect Paul Ritter relied on Piaget to develop his ‘educreational’ theory in the 1960s and 70s, which circulated in reports on architectural education in Australia. Papers may show how these liaisons altered curricula and teaching techniques in professional education, but also how they rebalanced the issues of disposition and expertise in the understanding of the built environment. Here we are thinking of Kevin Lynch’s Growing up in Cities, a 1977 UNESCO project designed to involve young people in the planning and creation of their urban environment, and Colin Wards book Child in the City (1978), which focused on how children negotiate and re-articulate their everyday environment by means of play, appropriation and imagination.

Elke Couchez, The University of Queensland
John Macarthur, The University of Queensland

Contact
Elke Couchez- e.couchez@uq.edu.au