Study Architecture 
ProPEL Call for Images
Experimental Landings Exhibition
Experimental Landings is an exhibition that interrogates how designers assert agency through the representation, organization, and formation of land. “Landings” is thus intended to “activate” a familiar architectural term that recognizes the often binary and dissociated realms of site versus property, ground versus territory. By shifting the term from noun to verb, the exhibition seeks to reposition land as an active agent with a broader context, territory, and community. By exploring its “mediatric” potential a critical project may provoke and highlight land’s intrinsic ability to engage and inform broader socio-political and/or climatological consequences. Understood as an elastic and open-ended framework of consideration this collective exhibition of work will showcase how architecture and landscape experiments across “land” address new definitions of formal practice across several thematics:
Artificial Earths
Artificial Earths will explore the results of a post-natural world where the production of landforms are often misidentified as natural despite their anthropogenic origins. This track of focus celebrates work of geomorphology where the designer critically engages in questions of naturality, in between site and non-site.
Seeding Resilience
Seeding Resilience, will showcase design work that works within the ecological practices of many types of fertilization. Work will examine both how land is a medium for the spread of biodiversity while also examining metaphorical cross-pollination in monocultural urban conditions with new programs and practices that better arm our cities for the futures of an anthropocene climate future.
Imaging Ground
Imaging Ground will interrogate how the recent shifts from 2-D photography to 3-D photogrammetry have implications on how designers see and represent the earth. Can the processes of drone-capture point-cloud models, which translate the heaviness of stone and earth into the lightness of field of image data points, alter the aesthetics of land in terms of its patterns and flows?
Mapping Maintenance
Mapping Maintenance, will examine design investigations that contemplate temporal adaptation of land over time in terms of its physical materiality as well as its cultural, historical, social, political and environmental matter. Can maintenance, as an act of repair or replacement, be a mechanism for addressing a climate in perpetual change?.
Through this open call and invited contributors, we seek exemplary 2D or 3D representations that open inquiry into how architect’s experiment in the design and practices of land-ing. We welcome projects that position themselves the topics of Artificial Earths, Imaging Ground, Seeding Resilience, and Mapping Maintenance, as well as others that might define their own conceptual territory in relation to the overall brief. 3D media/models may accompany flat media and/or be submitted on its own. However, support is primarily oriented toward 2D representations and any 3D inclusions are best included if already complete and/or funded for production, transport, installation and removal. All work should be suitable for display in non-museum, non-gallery public space with limited security and variable environmental conditions akin to a ‘Cabin in a Park.;
The exhibition, which is generously sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts, will open as part of the 2022 Teachers Summit’s closing events. The exhibition will be held in Pratt Institute’s, Graduate Architecture and Urban Design (GAUD) outpost on Governor Island’s Nolan Park House 14 and remain open to the public throughout the summer until late August.
The deadline for consideration will be Wednesday, May 25, 2022
Submission Requirements
Submission Deadline: May 25, 2022
Images
Submissions should include the following:
- Title of Work,
- One High Resolution Board, portrait oriented 36 x 42” (pdf or jpeg, 10MB limit)
- Written Description, not to exceed 350 words
– Clear indication to one of the four curatorial thematics or rendering a clear separate discourse.
– Clear indication of the proposed medium of display. If 3D medium is indicated, please address the authors funding source, and plans for transportation, installation during the month of June and removal in late August.
– Faculty Research work is preferred though work done in the context of an academic studio will be considered. If proposed exhibition work was explored in a classroom setting, a clear indication of authorship should be established citing both the faculty and the student. - Submissions must be written in English.
Curated Exhibition
Accepted authors agree to exhibit their work in the Experimental Landings Exhibition. Accepted authors will be required to complete a copyright transfer form and agree to allow the summit co-chairs to curate an exhibition to be held at the 2022 Teachers Summit for Climate Agency. Accepted authors must pay full summit registration for inclusion in the program and in the exhibition.
The Organizing Committee reserves the right to withhold a paper or image from the program if the author has refused to comply with the guidelines. Failure to comply with the summit deadlines or request for materials in advance may result in an author being dropped from the program.
How to Submit
The deadline for submitting to the Teachers Summit is May 25, 2022. Authors will submit image proposals through ACSA’s online interface.
Partners
Questions
Michelle Sturges
Conferences Manager
202-785-2324
msturges@acsa-arch.org
Eric W. Ellis
Senior Director of Operations and Programs
202-785-2324
eellis@acsa-arch.org
