Describing Architecture – Call for submissions

Submissions are invited in any medium from anyone. The exhibition has previously included work across a wide range of media – drawing, text, photography, model and film – and from a broad spectrum of participants, including among others, architects, artists, students and graduates. Describing Architecture presents an opportunity to step outside established professional working constraints in order to use the exhibtion as a productive space, to learn from other practitioners. Work in progress can be submitted, and due to the scale of the spaces, there are opportunities to support the inclusion of large format work.

Describing Architecture was inaugurated in 2010 as an annual exhibition exploring architectural representation and its pivotal role in designing and documenting built space. The exhibition continues to embrace alternative modes of representation and approaches to design, with a view to providing visitors with meaningful insight into the practice of architecture, alongside its critical relationship to the visual arts environment.

Beginning this year the intention is to extend the programme of the exhibition over a longer two-year period with the aim of allowing a fuller exploration of the selected theme ‘Memory and Place’. The exhibition in October and submissions to the open call will be used as the primary source material and inspiration for further strands to emerge from the submitted work. In this way the exhibition will seek to produce rather than merely convey knowledge. These collections will develop and respond to the particulars of each configuration, using physical exhibition, print publication, online catalogue or digital media, to ensure the widest possible audience and engagement with the work.

‘Memory and Place’ is thematically connected to the immediate locality of the exhibition venues as well as to broader contemporary concerns across architecture, geography, art and society. Distinguished Finnish architect, Juhani Pallasmaa, argues in his essay ‘Space, Place, Memory and Imagination’ that ‘buildings project epic narratives’, reaffirming the view that the creation of place is fundamentally integral to society’s attachment to memory, individual and collective – to human constructions of space and its use.

Call for submissions
First Stage: Online Submission
Deadline: Friday 19th September 2014 by 6pm
Format: Email work for selection to: contact@describingarchitecture.com
Include: Title, Medium and Size, Brief written description, 1-3 jpg images of proposed submission (images of work in progress can also be included)
Participants will be notified by Friday 26th September, with final delivery for 9th October