Convenors: Elif Kaymaz (Middle East Technical University), Caner Arıkboğa (Middle East Technical University)
Military architecture is a spatial paradox—designed for permanence yet subject to decay, built for impenetrability yet frequently abandoned, and if in use, strictly controlled within yet completely opaque to the public. Positioned along frontiers and strategic landscapes, defense as an architectural program does not merely occupy space but actively transforms the environment—land, sea, and air—into a strategic asset, controlling movement, visibility, and access. This antagonistic relationship with the environment depends on an extensive apparatus of surveying, mapping, and appropriate scientific research, embedding military logic into both material and epistemic domains. (Weizman, 2007) Materially, military infrastructures operate outside conventional planning constraints, unbound by legal, economic, or civic oversight. Fortifications, bunkers, and surveillance networks inscribe power onto terrain, engineered to dominate their surroundings while resisting adaptation. Unlike civilian architecture, which evolves through cycles of occupation and repurposing, military structures are designed for durability yet often rendered obsolete by shifting geopolitical conditions. Their presence lingers beyond their function, shaping landscapes through exclusion, secrecy, and contested access. Epistemologically, the tools developed to control and comprehend these spaces—satellite imaging, aerial reconnaissance, classified cartographies—are not merely instruments of representation but extensions of warfare itself. The archives we rely on to write environmental histories are often militarized, structuring how landscapes are perceived, classified, and remembered. (Ashworth, 1991) Yet deciphering architectural and geographic knowledge from the material legacies of defense remains an unresolved challenge.
This session invites scholars to examine how military infrastructures endure beyond their strategic purpose, shaping not only physical terrain but also the frameworks through which built environments are conceptualized. How do these spaces continue to govern movement, memory, and materiality long after their operational use has faded? What alternative methodologies might unsettle the militarized epistemologies embedded in architectural humanities research through archives, maps, and images? Overall, this session explores how military environments have been tamed into disciplinary knowledge while leaving behind untamed traces that shape epistemologies.
Format: In person paper session
Deadline for individual paper abstracts: 2 June 2025, 5 pm (GMT)
Confirmation of accepted papers: August 2025
Conference dates: Saturday 22 – Monday 24 November 2025
Conference convenors:
Dr Ranald Lawrence, Dr Christina Malathouni, Dr Yat Shun Kei, University of Liverpool
For further details and regular updates, please see the AHRA 2025 conference website:
https://www.virtual-lsa.uk/ahra2025/.
Contact: ahra2025@liverpool.ac.uk
Generously supported by the British Academy, the 2025 Architectural Humanities Research Association international conference aims to highlight the critical contribution that humanities-driven studies can make to the intersections between subjects as complex and inter-disciplinary as architecture and environment(s). The conference will explore the multiplicity of meanings behind the term ‘environment’, and how these are used and interpreted in architecture and related disciplines, both in contemporary practice and in historical precedents. An ‘environment’ fundamentally describes a relationship: between an object (or subject), and something that surrounds it (from the French environer: ‘to surround, encircle, encompass’). We can only define our environment – what surrounds us – by assuming an understanding of who and what we are. While contemporary scholarship in disciplines including philosophy, science, sociology, history of science and geography explore humanity’s impact on the natural world, architects and planners are tasked with the unique responsibility to alter environment(s), with (or without) knowledge of how to work with (or overcome) constraints associated with these uncertainties.