About the Symposium
Architectural creation, its representation, interpretation, and associated activities more often than not are seen as processes of revelation. However, one can argue that architecture hides as much as it reveals. The Purloined Letter, a detective story written by Edgar Allen Poe, describes the chase to look for a stolen letter with confidential information. The story revolves around the search for a letter hidden by being left out in the open. Allen Poe highlights a complicated relationship between visibility, revelation, clarity and its complementary hiding, concealing, camouflaging.
In the realm of architecture, are there examples of ‘hiding’ in teaching, representing, knowing, writing and building architecture? If so, how do those manifest themselves? How is hiding practiced under other terms that obscure the practice of concealment? What does it result in? What sources does it emerge from and who operates behind it?
This symposium aims to explore processes of hiding that can take representational, material and theoretical forms.
Architectures of Hiding is the inaugural event in the series of biennial symposia called Agora, organized by Carleton Research | Practice of Teaching | Collaborative (CR|PT|C).
CR|PT|C is formed by PhD candidates and students, Post-Professional Master students, and faculty members from the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism, Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada.
Held on September 24–26, 2021, the symposium is organized and coordinated by Rana Abughannam, Émélie Desrochers Turgeon and Pallavi Swaranjali with the supervision of Federica Goffi and with the advisorship of Monica Eileen Patterson.
Under the theme of Architectures of Hiding, The Art and Craft of Asking your Boss for a Raise attempts to access the dynamic material conditions of the past in its most banal, everyday forms, artefacts and their mechanisms, visualised and played-out in theatrical space (for this project, a stage adaptation of Georges Perec’s novella entitled The Art and Craft of Asking Your Boss for a Raise) utilising constraint operations (defined by Harry Mathews as, “A strict and clearly definable rule, method, procedure or structure that generates a [textual work],” expanded by Georges Perec as, “describable, definable [and] available to everyone.”). The podcast features Josh Silver in conversation with Ryan Stec, Artistic Director at Artengine, and Pallavi Swaranjali, co-convenor, Architectures of Hiding and co-coordinator of C R | P T | C. The creative piece by Josh Silver can be found at www.architecturesofhiding.com/exhibition
JOSH SILVER is a multidisciplinary designer, researcher, writer, translator, and indexer. He received his M.Arch and BAS from the University of Toronto. His work explores spatialized writing in constraint, architectural processing, digital archaeology, and the infra-ordinary.
Sound is inherently tied to space, it traverses. Once you start considering the possibility of a spaceless sound, you are delving into a realm of abstraction. Two types of re-encodings of sound that might be considered aspatial are the conversion of “vibrations moving through the air” to a digital signal and our memory of sonic events.
