Conference Theme

My wing is ready for flight,
I would like to turn back.
If I stayed timeless time,
I would have little luck.

Gerhard Scholem's poem stimulated Walter Benjamin's insightful reading of a Paul Klee's painting, Angelus Novus. This is how Benjamin pictured the angel of history: eyes open and wings spread, the angel's face is turned to the past in which we "perceive a chain of events," though the angel "sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage…." Benjamin continued; "the angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise." The storm propels the angel forward, into the future to which the angel's back is turned. According to Benjamin, "this storm is what we call progress."

The word progress drives from the Latin progressus, meaning to go forward. In its early English use the word related to a physical march, signifying the developmental process of a series of events. As late as the fifteenth century, the word was used without any particular ideological connotation. However, in the late Renaissance discourse on imitation, artists were expected to represent nature and the work of the past not as they were but as they ought to be. Not until the seventeenth century was the term used in association to the idea of history. In the famous literary debate between the ancients and the moderns, the latter saw themselves as "progressive," mainly because they could rise on the shoulders of the former and thus could see the past better. In the late nineteenth century and in the early decades of modernism, it was not enough to be just modern. Civilisation and improvement in the fields of science and technology propelled a secularised vision of paradise, the different facets of which became the main concern of the historical avant-gardes in art and occasionally modern architecture.

Benjamin wrote his essay on the angel of history in the late nineteen thirties. A decade or so later, the western world was forced to have second thoughts about any whole-hearted support of the idea of progress, as evidenced in technological innovations and scientific discoveries. Post-war architects, while still using industrial techniques, perceived a more modest role for themselves and architecture in social transformation. While the ideological battle between progressives and conservatives seemed inevitable in the realm of politics, architects turned instead to structuralist and post-structuralist theories. Authorship was indeed questioned by appropriation of forms of preceding work, or by seeking an intertextual relationship between an artist and his/her forbears.

In the last two decades architects have attempted to save architecture from mirroring the mechanism of late capitalism, and the architecture project has changed in many ways. Although, for example, the images published in various magazines and journals pepper architecture with a touristic taste, but who could deny the contribution photography had, and still does have, to architectural historians? Even though the idea of Zeitgeist has lost its weight in the work of many theoreticians and practicing architects today, are not both camps re-thinking the foundation of architecture according to the actuality of the present? It is true that some modernists claimed to have discarded the past, but in what ways does the present re-thinking of themes like innovation and creativity differ from the Renaissance idea of license? Moreover, although the plan and section drawings have remained the main means of re-presentation, who could deny the fact that computer aided design has challenged the capabilities of traditional stereotomy? The idea of the open-plan has lost its formative force, and interior space is disintegrated into many fragmentary boxes, but in what ways are these architectonic transformations discussed in contemporary theories of domesticity?

The questions raised here are among many that problematise the myth of an automatic vision of historical progress. But the crucial question to ask would be: how to progress the valuable experience of modern architecture without falling into the utopias of technological determinism? 

The conference calls for abstracts addressing the idea of "progress". Papers should discuss progress in the context of the following suggested themes. Creative presentation of these themes in reference to the architectural history of Australia/New Zealand is encouraged.

Suggested themes to be addressed:
• built environment
• domesticity
• education
• history
• imitation
• journalism
• practice
• technology
• theory

There will be a special session(s) entitled Postwar Architecture, Australia/New Zealand, 1960-2000, to gather perspectives on the "progress" of 20th century architecture in Australia and New Zealand.

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