SU’s School of Architecture to host regional ACSA meeting Oct. 29-31

SU’s School of Architecture to host regional ACSA meeting Oct. 29-31October 25, 2004Amy Schmitzaemehrin@syr.edu

Syracuse University’s School of Architecture will host the 2004 Northeast Regional Meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) Oct. 29-31. Titled “Changing Territories, New Cartographies,” the meeting will bring architecture educators from across the United States and Canada to the SU campus to discuss recent changes in the architecture field as well as new techniques and tactics that have been developed in response to those changes.

Michael Speaks, director of the Metropolitan Design and Research Program at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, will give the keynote address Oct. 29 at 7 p.m. The address will take place in Room 108 of Slocum Hall.

“This conference, under the able direction of Associate Professor Terrance Goode, reflects the ways in which architecture broaches the wider intellectual field,” says Mark Robbins, dean of the School of Architecture. “SU’s School of Architecture is the ideal location for this type of discussion-we are currently ranked number one on the East Coast by the Design Futures Council, and many of the panel discussions are issues we address daily, both with our students and with the wider Syracuse community.”

Speaks is the editor of the “Writing Architecture” series, senior editor of “Architecture New York (ANY)” and founding editor of “Polygraph: A Journal of Cultural Criticism.” His other publications include “Mart Stam’s Trousers:

Dutch Modernism Reconsidered,” “The Critical Landscape: Architectural Bodies,” “Architecture as Metaphor: Language, Number, Money” and “Earth Moves: The Furnishing of Territories.” He received his B.A. from the University of Mississippi and Ph.D. from Duke University.

The meeting will continue in the Schine Student Center on Oct. 30-31 with panel discussions moderated by SU faculty. Panel topics include “Negotiating the boundaries of political and economic territories”; “Maps and bodies”; “Re-viewing histories as territorial conflicts: episodes from recent decades”; “Sciences and architectures”; “Tactics of site specificity”; “Performance, ornament and technology”; “Urban cartographies and their construction”; and “Landscape, cartographies and the production of form.”

“This is an exciting opportunity for our faculty to see what architecture colleagues from schools around this country and Canada are thinking about,” says Goode. “Meetings like this provide a setting for the exchange of ideas that is so invigorating for everybody. It is a great learning experience for our students.”

ACSA events also include a reception on Oct. 30 at the Light Work gallery starting at 6 p.m., followed by a presentation by Robbins in Watson Theater, located in Watson Hall.

All events held as part of the ACSA NE Regional Meeting are free and open to the public.