Call for Papers: Print Media and Architecture. Bitácora Arquitectura 43
Bitácora Arquitectura is a peer-reviewed academic journal published by the School of Architecture of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, UNAM since 1999. The journal specializes in the critical, historical and theoretical study of architecture, landscape architecture, industrial design, urbanism, and art as studied from multiple vantage points. It is published three times a year and its goal is to disseminate knowledge on these topics and, therefore, it is aimed towards a wide audience including students, architects, philosophers, town planners, designers, artists, historians, critics and theorists of art, architecture, and social sciences, as well as any other person interested in the themes addressed in the journal.
Print Media and Architecture. When Europeans arrived in the Americas, they brought with them architectural treatises and a new form of communicating knowledge, which transformed our perception and understanding of the world: the printing press. These books inaugurated a new way of understanding architecture by competing with the oral cultural tradition and saturating it with the reproduction of images and texts. The modern culture of the reproduction of print publications has determined our way of seeing the world. With new educational forms, architectonic knowledge was not just taught and disseminated through books and magazines, but also mediated and regulated by them. As a result, the image that architects had of their discipline was filtered through the intentions of editors. With the rise of the avant-garde, advertising techniques and the enormous development of the publishing industry were exploited to their fullest extent. Architects obsessed themselves with and specialized in the use of the most important contemporary media, which – fragmentary, ephemeral and rapid like newspapers – incorporated aspects of an entirely new experience in the world, one based on the urban subjectivities of shock, speed and violence. Over recent centuries, machines have shaped architecture, first through the standardization of images (from Renaissance models to mass reproductions in industrially-printed books), then through the standardization of elements. For many, the death of these two traditions is inevitable. If, five centuries ago, the encounter with the Gutenberg Galaxy changed the course of Western architecture, it’s possible that the ever-increasing interest in cyberspace will have even greater consequences. We invite you to reflect on these issues and all those related to print media in the field of architectonic culture.
Please submit your papers by 1 October 2019 at bitacoraunam@gmail.com and bitacora.arquitectura@unam.mx