Key Information
What
The THEORY FORUM is an annual one-day event hosted by Sheffield School of Architecture and Landscape, focusing each year on a theme of contemporary relevance for architectural theory and practice. It provides an intense introduction to the theory, history and contemporary discourse around the theme, through engaging with national and international speakers.
This year's forum is linked to a forthcoming special issue of field: following the completion of the AHRC/DfG-funded research project Architecture is Climate, which proposes new ways for architecture to be understood, practiced, and taught through exploring its deep entanglement with climate breakdown. Instead of asking the normative question, ‘what can architecture do for climate breakdown?’, Architecture is Climate reverses it and asks instead, ‘what does climate breakdown do to architecture?’ Climate breakdown is not something to be fixed or mitigated by tweaks to architectural production through conventional notions of sustainability; it fundamentally pulls the rug from beneath architectural practice, exposing its foundations in colonial, patriarchal, and extractive ways of thinking and doing.
To say that Architecture is Climate is to challenge many of the orthodoxies, assumptions and protocols of architecture as it is professionally defined. To say that Architecture is Climate is to situate it within an unpredictable and volatile context, and this is daunting, scary even, for a profession that is founded on control. To say that Architecture is Climate is exposing, stripping away the layers of protection that any profession wraps itself within, leaving architecture in a raw state—but one which is both necessary and an opportunity. Away from the myopic version of architecture as mere static building, an expanded architecture shares many of the characteristics of climate. Both are relational, bringing together multiple human and beyond-human conditions. Both are temporal, formed in the past, affecting the present and projecting into the future. Both are profoundly shaped by the tenets and operations of modernity. Both are determined by the forces of capitalism. Both are experienced through multiple senses – visceral, haptic, emotional. Both are understood through a range from the measurable to the ineffable. Both are impactful on the human and beyond-human worlds.
THEORY FORUM 2024 will showcase a range of responses to this call which:
explore the historical entanglements of architecture and climate in terms of their shared foundations;
narrate and interpret alternative spatial practices which face and rearrange those entanglements; and
imagine alternative futures for architecture and spatial practice.
When
Friday 6 December 2024, 10:30-16:30
Where
Firth Hall, Firth Court, The Univeristy of Sheffield
Who
The event is open to all students and staff. It is also a core part of MArch and MA Architectural Design theory modules.
