The Sixth International Conference on Competitions launches, looking at the concept of experimentation within architectural competitions.
The Sixth International Conference on Competitions (ICC) has launched with support from the RIBA and the UIA and will take place at Leeds Beckett University from 27 to 29 October 2016. This year will be the first time that the ICC is to be held in the UK.
The purpose of ICC 2016 is to offer a window into current interdisciplinary research on the topic of architecture competitions. The conference is part of a series that looks at competitions as a specific field of knowledge and questions historical and current aspects, presuppositions, concepts and practices.
Dr Maria Theodorou, Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Leeds Beckett University and organiser of the conference explained: “In recent years there has been a surge of Ideas Competitions and Open Calls, which do not seek to produce a building or an architecture structure, but look instead to raise awareness and pinpoint current social, political, technological issues in our cities; these aim to entice experimentation by reformulating and resetting the very terms and conditions within which a problem is posed or arises.”
As with previous ICC conferences, architecture competitions will be considered as a complex research topic rather than as a mere practical activity in which architects and architecture students take part regularly. The history of competitions, their organisational, legal and conceptual framework, the role of clients and professional organisations, are all aspects which will be looked at in depth by researchers and practitioners. The specific focus of this year’s conference is to frame the various aspects of competitions within the concept of experimentation.
Leeds Beckett has announced an Open Call for papers. Dr Theodorou said: “We are looking for papers that aim to broaden our understanding of the category of experimentation, with and within architecture competitions, by examining, historically or otherwise, the various types of competitions, the effects of architectural representation ‘idioms’ deployed, as well as the social, financial and political motivations and impact a competition might have or had in the past.”
The conference also includes a professional organisations’ panel discussion, where in this session, RIBA and UIA speakers will consider the concept of experimentation as manifested within the RIBA UK client-driven and ‘pragmatist’ competitions approach and within the UIA ‘social’ and conceptual framework applied to the UIA worldwide competitions.
The keynote speakers confirmed so far are:
Eva Franch i Gilabert, Storefront for Art and Architecture, USA
Kristian Kreiner, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Aymone Nicolas, Ecoterre, France
Jeremy Till, University of the Arts London, UK
Download the information related to this event here.
Title
International Competitions ConferenceType
ConferenceWebsite
Organizers
Leeds Beckett UniversityFrom
October 27, 2016 10:00 AMUntil
October 29, 2016 05:00 PMVenue
Leeds Beckett UniversityAddress