In collaboration with the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) and the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC), Aarhus School of Architecture is pleased to announce the ARCC-EAAE 2024 international joint conference. The conference is hosted by Aarhus School of Architecture in Aarhus, Denmark.

Our biannual joint conferences aim to invite and exchange ideas, research, strategies, didactics, reflections and debates on the built environment, architecture and allied disciplines. With the theme “Architecture into the Unknown,” we aim to delve into the future paths of architecture. Our objective is to explore how architectural research and pedagogy can drive this discourse, allowing us to investigate, experiment, and equip ourselves for the evolving role of architecture as a discipline and practice in an uncertain future.

Aim of the Conference

It is evident that architecture and related fields are undergoing significant changes in response to various pressing issues. Adapting to climate change might be the field’s most critical challenge today. The needed adaptations raise questions about the consumption of material and spatial resources, which along with increasing demands for social responsibility and accountability, challenge the ethical and aesthetic foundations of the architecture discipline. The emergence of artificial intelligence challenges notions of creativity and authorship. At the same time, digital design and fabrication tools intermesh with fundamental economic and organisational changes in the building industry, challenging disciplinarity boundaries and workflows and established architectural paradigms.

As we navigate these changes, it becomes clear that architects must remain reflective, agile and innovative to understand and engage with the needs of a rapidly evolving world. It is a challenging and exciting time to be involved in architecture. The challenges we face provide opportunities for transformation, creativity, and innovation but also for examining the architecture discipline’s ideals, methods and practices.

During the conference, we aim to delve into how research and didactics can contribute to the complex challenges facing the field of architecture. Our objective is to examine these challenges from a dual perspective. On the one hand, we want to explore how architectural research and didactics can support architecture to examine, engage and act in these challenges. Such examinations can involve exploring theories, quantitative and qualitative methods, tools, collaborations, and interdisciplinary interactions to tackle the challenges. On the other hand, we invite participants to investigate how these challenges affect the future discipline of architecture: Is the field of architecture disappearing, diversifying, fragmenting, transforming, or is it resting on an immutable core that allow the discipline to engage with new challenges? We delve deeper into the discipline’s current state and attempt to understand how it can continue to evolve and adapt to changing circumstances. We aim to explore how architects can make a meaningful contribution to the future of our built environment.

The conference will invite experts in the field to come together and share their knowledge and experiences, providing insights that will contribute to improving and critically challenging our understanding of architecture’s possible futures. Through presentations, discussions and debates, we hope to create a platform for exchanging ideas and generating new perspectives that will drive the field forward.

Presentations

The conference promises to be a lively and stimulating forum for debate and exchange, offering valuable insights into the evolving role of architectural education in shaping the future of our built environment. To engage the entangled and complex questions of the potential futures of architecture, we will organise presentations according to three different perspectives on the conference topic. With this organisation, we aim to create encounters across the established research topics and subdisciplinary boundaries of architectural research.

Observatories include presentations that address the overarching perspectives, long-term trends, and historical development of architecture. The presentations can be aimed at architecture’s societal, social, economic, or technical entanglements. It can be directed at the emergence, transformation, and development of architectural thought patterns, practices, or methods from historical or future-oriented perspectives.

Laboratories include presentations that focus on well-defined questions in experimental settings aimed at exploring, understanding, or developing contributions within a specific field. These proposals may address various areas, including design tools and techniques, digital technologies, fabrication and construction methodologies, material studies, case studies, building analysis, and monographical studies.

Studios include presentations based on creative processes and real-world experiences, particularly unpredictable, subjective, and complex situations connected with complex contexts, individual motivations, and aesthetic or value-based decisions. This type of research may involve practice-embedded research, artistic research, teaching-based research, and user-involvement processes.

Each session will have a moderator, who will coordinate with authors regarding session guidelines and the general expectations for the session in advance. Accepted authors will have approximately 10 minutes to present their work during the conference. Conference organisers reserve the right to withhold a paper from the program if the author fails to comply with guidelines, including deadlines and submission requests.

Authors accepted to present at the conference must complete a copyright transfer form and agree to present the paper/poster/explorative practice at the conference before publication. The policy is that accepted authors must pay full conference registration to be included in the conference presentation and proceedings.