Session #137

– Papers followed by a Round Table / Discussion –

Drawing on Dirty Theory as a concept-tool, the session proposes to examine how critical engagements with a context bring the labours of care, maintenance, and repair to the core of architectural practice. Following dirt at the intersection of the ongoing environmental, social and political crises, on the one hand exposes us to the risks and toxicities latent in it, and on the other opens up a space from which to trouble architecture and to engage in the political project of decolonisation; a “decolonisation of the otherwise too clean imaginary” (Frichot 2019). If dirtiness exposes the powers and injustices at play in the adjudication of cleanness or purity (Douglas 1966, Liboiron and Lepawksy 2022, Shotwell 2016), it can also prompt “a creative movement, a profound relationship with our local environment-worlds” (Frichot 2019). Here, to care is not only to be present and situated—to be ‘on the ground’—but to commit one’s body and attention to a specific ground; to be woven into it as it moves through space and time. Indeed, to “stay with the trouble” (Haraway 2016) is a practice of repeated operations and routines—the patient and caring co-existence with that which is troublesome, or might turn into trouble.

The round-table session interrogates the nexus of care and dirt in a pedagogical context. How can care be foregrounded in the teaching and learning of architecture? What shifts does it prompt in the architecture studio, and how are these facilitated through the writing of briefs, the engagement with situated communities and materialities, and in forms of assessment? In other words: how does the architecture studio begin to ascribe value to encounters and constraints that foreground not abstract concepts and intents, but the dirty and dusty realities of that which already exists? And how do such encounters negotiate forms of care, repair and maintenance in a world that is polluted and always partially unknown/unknowable?

We invite proposals in the form of a 300-word abstract addressing the themes described above. The conference session, which will take place in person, will consist of short presentations followed by a round-table discussion.