Kopenhagen: As Found – Internationale Konferenz zur postindustriellen Stadt

In landscape architecture and -urbanism, architecture and heritage studies the concept site is increasingly gaining attention. What is found on the site, the uses and the interpretations of it have become determining aspects for the theoretical investigation as well as design and preservation approaches towards the urban landscape. This increased awareness and the new concepts of site leads us to new theory, practice and politics. As Found is the optic through which the conference in Copenhagen, 17th and 18th June 2010 will revisit and reflect upon the everyday urban landscape.

 

The notion As Found contains a verb and hence opens up the possibility for addressing the situatedness of reading and operating within sites. As a design approach As Found stresses the qualities of what is already there as a positive starting point for interaction between past, present and future states, between the act of preserving and that of transforming.

As Found enables us to perceive post-industrial urban landscapes as dynamic lifeworlds rather than as enclosed objects.

Since designers, artists and writers began to study the ordinary environment and everyday culture half a century ago dualisms such as architecture contra sheds; high culture contra the everyday; aesthetic contra anaesthetic have become highly contested. Currently, those hierarchies are contested in other ways, i.e. by the landscape architect Alexandre Chemetoff when including seemingly anaesthetic buildings and roads from the post-war years in his new design, claiming that exactly that which is currently disliked must be handed over to the future and integrated as part of an economization of places-approach The interest in the ordinary and the vernacular appears to be wide ranging and have many different roots and implications for practice. Which sets of values are steering our interest in the ordinary and the vernacular? What is currently being overlooked and suppressed?

As Found can be associated with both the idea of identity and that of ecology as part of a renewed site focus. The globalised experience economy is desperately looking for and promoting the spectacular and the exceptional. Can less spectacular identities be developed by interaction with that which is found and which perspectives do this open up for the professions engaged in this field? And further; how does the ecological imperative inform and transform the way we regard the interaction between humans and nature?

Copenhagen, 17th and 18th June

As Found Call for abstracts (verlängert bis zum 25. Februar 2010!)

World in Denmark 2010 (zur website: bitte anklicken)

As Found is anti-utopian and focuses on the specific rather than the absolute. How can we articulate, discuss and evaluate different approaches when working with the specific?