The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE) are pleased to announce the fourth, biennial joint Teachers Conference being hosted by Dalhousie University. The conference will take place June 12-14, 2025, in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Date:
Location:
Halifax, Nova Scotia , Canada
Dalhousie University
As architectural concerns expand to account for today’s social and environmental crises, architects are increasingly caught up in a multitude of conflicts. These conflicts transcend individual scales: from the classroom to the community, and from the building to geopolitics. Architects may orient architectural tools toward social ends, but architecture is not conventionally defined as a practice of mediation, negotiation, or reconciliation. Architects are not trained in conflict resolution. To consider how the built environment produces or diffuses conflict is to rethink the role of the designer, imagine new interdisciplinary interactions, and clarify the social, political, and technological motivations for architectural pedagogy.
Building on agonistic models of democracy which present conflict not as an obstacle but an opportunity, this conference acknowledges that conflict is inevitable and asks how architectural education and practice can respond to the increasingly palpable conflicts around us. Differences of opinion in the studio, curricular obstacles, preservationist activism, the architectural labor movement, tactical and humanitarian architecture, war and urbicide—how can the discipline actively engage difference to move beyond polarization? Educators today have been tasked with equipping the discipline with a toolkit for vastly divergent concerns. Yet even macro-conflicts linked to humanity’s addiction to oil, reparations, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and migration policy demand highly localized spatial actions that can ripple within communities. At the middle scale, the global crisis of public space can also be considered: with the increasing privatization of space, what room is there for dissent and democratic rebuilding? Conversely, emergent material investigations and design-build work can be starting points for rethinking conflicts linked to extractive systems and resource scarcity.
Beyond mapping architectural “controversies,” this conference asks how conflict situations can be reframed as sites of design. In this international conversation on pedagogy and research, there may be divergent frames of reference for the relationship between politics and architecture. Acts of representing, making, spatializing can render the mechanics of disagreement visible and suggest alternate pathways for equitable futures. The task is also to assess architecture’s disciplinary vulnerability: interdisciplinary alliances or “cross-appointed” experts can produce nimble models of practice that reconsider how institutions can legitimately participate in social change. Conflict reorganizes the relationship between construction and repair. What new structures for resolution are possible?
With this call, the joint conference of the North American and European associations for architectural education solicits scholarly presentations for the conference and proceedings. The conference addresses practitioners, academics, and citizens in general with an interest in exploring the present and future societal role of architectural education and invites participants to submit papers or posters.
The conference invites practitioners, academics, and designers to submit papers or posters reflecting on Conflict : Resolution in the following tracks:
DESIGN AGAINST VIOLENCE Architecture is entangled in warfare. While architects for the past century concerned themselves with postwar reconstruction, educators today increasingly grapple with the spatialization of violence itself, in its many forms. How can design tools mitigate urbicide and domicide? How can educators navigate the geopolitical scale? In what new ways can architecture recover cultural memory and forge solidarities?
DESIGNS OF MOBILITY Humanitarian shelters, refugee camps, urban interventions for newcomers–complex sites of migration have filtered into architecture’s purview. In addition to the acute conflicts of displacement, there are also “slower” conflicts of inequality that challenge our understanding of community and require interdisciplinary thinking. How can architecture be activated in non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and other institutional contexts? Can architectural education rearticulate the “borders” that divide states and communities? How does the figure of the migrant reshape design values?
ENVIRONMENTAL REDESIGN Since the 1970s, environmental activism has filtered into architectural discourse. Today, architectural education must demonstrate awareness of contested terrains of land and resource use, and highlight the need to repair our damaged planet–forests, oceans, mines, ecosystems, microhabitats–across multiple scales. How do we design for energy justice? How can schools of architecture be rewired through Indigenous ways of knowing and undo the legacies of environmental racism? What new pathways for environmental remediation can architectural education offer?
DESIGNS IN PUBLIC Architects use design to navigate conflicts in their own communities and reshape the public realm in their cities. They are also increasingly concerned with the legal conflicts around property, land, densification, and other developer-led initiatives. How can architectural educators partner with community groups to rethink disability legislation, food insecurity, homelessness, and infrastructural access? How do we design for dissent and rebuild democracy? How can architects recover public space?
REDESIGNING OUR INSTITUTIONS Institutions are reluctant to change, and pedagogical conflicts are often necessary for curricular innovation. Contemporary issues such as inclusion in the discipline, research ethics, and artificial intelligence are reshaping the classroom and the university. What new models of collaboration are emerging, and how is the instructor/student relationship being reconsidered? What are the “fundamentals” of architecture today, and what are the debates about them? How can design education sensitively engage conflict and crisis?
MAKING AS DESIGN Experiments in emergent materials and design-build initiatives tackle social and environmental conflict from the bottom up. Moreover, the values of maintenance and renovation are increasingly leveraged against demolition and speculation. How can small acts of architectural innovation address conflict and produce change? What are the politics of assembly? How can craft, digital craft, architectural labor, and knowledge transfer among makers reaffirm human agency?
