99th ACSA Annual Meeting

The New York Times architecture critic, Nicolai Ourousoff has described Toyo Ito’s work as being the “next step on the evolutionary chain,” calling out Ito’s belief that to create a human architecture it “must somehow embrace seemingly contradictory values.” Ourousoff suggests that “instead of a self-contained utopia, [Ito] offers us multiple worlds, driving in and out of focus like a dream," embraces ambiguity, is interested in the realm of the “in between,” and “forces us to look at the world through a wider lens.” Ito, like many architects who came to prominence in the past decade, aims to expand possibilities and, in doing so, to make room for a wider range of human experience. This demand for a wider agenda for modern architecture, introduced to the discipline in the 1950s and followed by Postmodernism’s demands for greater diversity, has left the discipline open—wide open—perhaps too open. Free from the universalist, utopian confines of Modernism, and working in an intellectual context that embraces a more complex conception of contemporary reality, architects are now not only free, but required to interpret and, indeed, choose their position relative to this expanded field. With such choice comes the responsibility to ask: Where Do You Stand? The purpose of this conference is to provide a venue to articulate, develop, and question where you stand with respect to your thinking and doing in architecture. For more information please visit https://www.acsa-arch.org/conferences/Annual2011.aspx