Paper Abstracts:

Wood and Stone: some thoughts on the sentience of matter
David Abram

How do our animal senses respond to the material field in which we find ourselves immersed? What do our breathing bodies make of the elemental realities we bump up against -- the textures of rock, the tastes of wind and water? I hope to ponder, here, some of the ways that our creaturely flesh is influenced and quietly informed by the materials from which our buildings and artifacts are fashioned. It is an informing that often operates far below our conscious cogitations, through a silent interchange, or dialog, between our animal body and the bodily world it encounters. To the experiencing animal, it would seem, there is no aspect of the sensuous surroundings - no earthborn entity, or substance, or human-made object -- that presents itself as utterly inert or inanimate. Matter, itself, matters. Link to Biography

This is About Pleasure: Human Habitats, Animal Memories, and Corporeal Ethics
Stacy Alaimo, University of Texas at Arlington

Gaston Bachelard wrote that "the home protects the dreamer." Despite the physical and psychological need for the safety of domestic enclosure, this seemingly benign dream of protection has morphed into a national delusion, with the borders of the home serving as a microcosm for national boundaries. The home, the yard, the apartment complex, the gated community, are places of mastery and precise delineation of boundaries--spaces of order and control. Against this increasingly disturbing spatial model that "cleans out" messy memories and nonhuman life forms, stand alternative, often utopian, modes of inhabiting that are embodied in art, film, and literature. These works encourage us to reenvision domestic space as a human habitat that is interconnected to wider ecosystems. They also boldly challenge us to make way for nonhuman memory, agency, and needs. Rather than hearing this environmental challenge as another call for frugality or deprivation, it can be welcomed as a call for a profusion of pleasurable practices. Drawing upon Sandilands' "ethics of the real," Weiss' intercorporeal ethic, Varela's selfless self, and the trajectory of Spinoza, Delueze, and the Australian feminists, allows us to envision an environmentalist and feminist ethics of inhabiting in which the human self engages in a process of becoming by way of particular corporeal practices and a receptivity toward the natural world. Link to Biography

Public Memory in the Making
Edward Casey, SUNY at Stony Brook

In the main part of my paper I shall examine the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and in particular the spontaneously constructed and enacted memorials that were created in Union Square just after the disaster took place. I will emphasize not only the inventiveness and solidarity of those who participated but also the emergence of an "inner hearth," whereby these hastily arranged but deeply moving commemorative gestures were the first moment in the formation of an official public memory that was soon to take on definite architectural, site-specific, and tendentiously political dimensions. Public memory in the course of creation will be contrasted with processes of individual recollection, social memory, and collective memory. I shall reconceive public memorialization in an effort to discern what makes commemoration a forceful as well as fitting event. Finally, I shall consider certain distinctive memorials from the U.S./Mexican border and Vietnam to see how conflicted or tragic occurrences are memorialized from the ground up by those who are most directly affected by these events -- before state-sanctioned forms of official commemoration usurp the stage. Link to Biography

Monuments in Time: Architecture, Tourism, and History in 20th-century Saigon
Lily Chi, Cornell University

The influence of mass tourism on the construction and experience of places in post-industrial culture is a commonly observed phenomenon. Evidence suggests that tourism was already an economic factor in early 20th-century empire-building, and an explicit consideration in the development of colonial cities. This paper explores the instructive example of Saigon: its construction and promotion as capital of French Cochinchina and its subsequent renovation by successive Vietnamese authorities. Narratives of the city in state-produced guidebooks offer view of the cultural 'space' envisioned in these building enterprises, and serve as basis for a broader reflection on alternative ways of thinking about architecture, history, and identity. Link to Biography

Exchanging Memories: Between Ethics and Poetics
Richard Kearney, Boston College

This paper will deal with the important role played by narrative imagination in the therapeutic traversal of other minds, times and places. Taking some examples from my own own personal experience of Ireland, I would like to explore how certain commemorations and memorials (for example, the Battle of the Boyne, the Irish Famine, etc.) can serve to divide or reconcile communities. Link to Biography

Invisibility: The Modernist Black Culture-Modern Architecture Nexus
Melvin L. Mitchell, FAIA, NOMA

In this paper I address the question from my book, "why didn't a "black architecture" develop in the same manner as other world-class black aesthetic forms, including music?" I first argue that there is such a thing as an inseparable "Music-Art-Architecture" triptych that renders modern architecture as racially black as it is white --just as is music and art. I then argue that there has been a disastrous eighty-year-old cultural estrangement of African American architects from Black America that can be traced to the start of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s and that occurred alongside the parallel shift of black architectural education from Tuskegee to Howard University. In the new 1920s modernist architecture in America, black architects bought into the proposition that architecture was racially neutral and therefore not a proper vehicle for expressing black culture, black economics, black political agendas, and black value systems. I argue that had black architects actually joined the Harlem Renaissance (architecture was the conspicuously missing art form), it could have resulted in a formalized legitimating of a Black Architecture in the same vein as Aaron Douglas's Black Art and Duke Ellington's Black Music. Link to Biography

The Task of Architecture within a Consumer Culture
Juhani Pallasmaa, Architect, Professor (Helsinki)

An architectural fundamentalism is on the rise. Through the instrumental manipulation of momentary aesthetic seductions, a deeply consumerist agenda emerges. This paper considers a series of strategies for architects to choose differently: the discovery of the giftedness of architecture through the practice of humility, patience, and the search for authenticity; resisting the uncritical use of computer-aided design through, for instance, a return to the embodied tactility of hand-drawing; or gaining the courage to set tasks, as Italo Calvino suggests "that no one else dares imagine." Link to Biography

Ethics and Poetics in Architectural Education
Alberto Pérez-Gómez, McGill University

Building upon a historical understanding of architecture as the disclosure of fundamental cultural orders, reducible neither to aesthetic or technical categories, this paper proposes a critical examination of architectural education in both school and practice. After establishing the present limitations issuing from our technological world, as well as the potential territory of the discipline, I undertake a philosophical discussion of ethics and poetics, drawing points of confluence out of apparent contradictions.

On the basis of a phenomenological and hermeneutic understanding, I then speculate on the possible shape of architectural education. Once the true nature of ethics and poetics as well as their crucial role for a significant architecture are made clear, my discussion aims at teasing out the appropriate forms of communication and delivery, distinct but equally crucial in the heterogeneous contexts of office practice and academic teaching. Link to Biography

Ethical Destinations of Native Filmmakers
Beverly R. Singer, University of New Mexico
Lincoln Ethics Affiliates Council Visiting Scholar

I have a ceramic sugar bowl handmade by someone in New Mexico that I bought at an upscale garage sale on Santa Fe's eastside. I love it because its so me--sky blue with an abstract landscape feel to the design. The thing that amazes me about this particular object is when it came into my life at a turbulent period of unknowns. My career, which was waiting to happen and in fact, my entire being was up in the air. Meaning was lost in worry about how to pay for my life on earth. I was living in a mobile home on a piece of land my father willed to me at Santa Clara Pueblo and that alone was something. My overall situation however was depressed. 'Enough' I said at the time and made a conscious shift in my perception and decided I would no longer wait to live and broke through a paralysis of fearful longing for something better. I wanted to make films and had just spent a year formally studying how to make them and generally knew I wanted something to do with filmmaking and their makers. It's interesting how the mind works once a decision is made as my own decision to change things moved into action. I moved to New York City within a few months and began a quest to learn through the exchange of ideas with other souls in search of creating truth, art, and a place to be and become.

That sugar bowl has been refilled many times and I am speaking about the films produced by Native filmmakers that highlight where we are twenty years later. Link to Biography

Reading a Drawer
Susan Stewart, University of Pennsylvannia

The penates, or Roman gods of the cupboard, were the protectors of stored things. Like the lares, the spirits of the dead ancestors who lived beneath the hearth, they required acts of propitiation and thanksgiving. In this paper I will be concerned with the innermost spaces of a house--drawers, pockets, cupboards, attics, cellars--and with the relations between storage, sacrifice, and display. I will discuss how the penates lived on in Western tradition in the folklore of household helpers and familiars. In the end, I will consider how such practices of propitiation and excess may have affected our sense of the aesthetic and specific developments in the history of literary form. Link to Biography

The Adamant of Time: Native American Land, Architecture, and Ethics
Jace Weaver, University of Georgia

The talk will examine traditional Native American attitudes toward land and traditional architecture. It will also discuss contemporary Native American architecture through examples drawn from Native architects such as Douglas Cardinal and Chief Boyd, as well as architecture by non-Natives designed for and with Native communities. Finally, it will explore how Native beliefs and practices might inform an ethic of place for architects engaged in projects on traditionally Native lands. Link to Biography