What does it mean for design to disappear? Absence, often seen as the result of a destructive force, may in fact be productive. While presence implies creation, absence promises possibilities.
Architecture, despite being closely associated with ‘creation’, in fact oscillates between the construction of the ever new and the destruction of the same ones as time, new trends, and advances in technology render them obsolete. The line between nostalgic monumentalization and the inevitable reality of demolition is drawn to establish the life cycle of any building. In today’s design culture that is as impatient as it is impermanent, we talk more about the actions of subtraction, erasure, and reduction. In such urban reality, presence and absence both make architecture.
If presence is the built space, physical existence, and fantasies about permanence, what is its counterpart: Absence?
What is architecture of absence, or absence of architecture?
Absence can be a found condition, a choice or a result. Absence is the conscious decision to remove what is redundant or in decay. Absence is to exist through speculations and to design through subtraction. Sometimes even it is a strategy of refusal. Absence is to have authorship of nothingness. Absence has no set form. It is inherently unknown, undefined, and indeterminate. Absence signals a moment to intervene and the decision to let be. Absence is also the unpredictable outcome of natural disasters or political unrest. Absence is the death of architecture and simultaneous creation of new potentials.
In what other ways and contexts can absence manifest itself? How can we design, represent, and author absence?
PLAT 6.0 welcomes architects, designers, thinkers, and anyone provoked by 'Absence' to submit design projects, essays, visual media, narratives, proposals, manifestos, and conversations that engage the notion of absence in architecture and its complementary creative fields.
Please submit all materials, abstracts, and/or inquires to editor@platjournal.com by December 1, 2016 for consideration. See www.PLATJournal.com for guidelines.
Download the information related to this competition here.
Title
Call for Submissions: PLAT 6.0 AbsenceType
Call for SubmissionsOrganizers
Submission Deadline
December 01, 2016 11:30 PMVenue
Rice University School of ArchitecturePrice
Free