Five College Architecture Symposium ‘Quickness: on Rhythms of Time in Contemporary Architecture’ to be Held Oct. 2-3 in Design Building

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Abstract gray and purple imagery with text: Quickness Five College Symposium

A Five College Architecture Symposium, Quickness: on Rhythms of Time in Contemporary Architecture, will take place in the atrium of the Design Building on October 2–October 3, 2024. Co-convened by Pari Riahi (UMass Amherst), Laure Katsaros (Amherst College) and Michael T. Davis (Mount Holyoke), this symposium in the third and last in a series on the pedagogy and practice of architecture, started in 2020. 

Three ideas shaped these series: First, in the face of the current climatic and environmental crises, architecture needs to integrate reconfiguration, adaptation, even degrowth into the realm of the built environment. Second, new methods of construction, as well as increasingly complex and diverse materials, each with a different impact on the environment, continue to change our field of action. Third, digital technologies have and continue to radically shift our collective horizon of thinking and making.  

The first symposium, Exactitude, in 2020, focused on the tensions between precision and play in architecture as a creative discipline. Multiplicity, in 2022, investigated how architecture participated in other networks and fields, and now Quickness will investigate how time and duration affects architecture, in its ideation and actuality. A group of distinguished architectural educators, historians, theorists, curators, will expand on four themes:

  • Quickness in Mind: From Simultaneity to Diachronicity, 
  • Quickness in Method: Abstraction versus Realization, 
  • Quickness in Making: Embracing the Material and Physical World,
  • Quickness in Body: Stasis, Floating and Agility   

The Series, supported by many entities across the University and Five Colleges, has been made possible through a continuous commitment to co-thinking, co-working, and dialogue across different fields and units. Participation is open and free to all. A detailed program can be found at umass.edu/architecture/work/symposia/quickness.

Article posted in Academics for Faculty and Current students