Coming Up
Past Conferences

Coming up

There are currently no upcoming conferences at the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building.

Past Conferences

Techniques and Technologies: Transfer and Transformation

4th International Conference of the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia
27 September - 29 September 2007

Specific technologies are continually transferred to architecture from fields such as logistics, psychology and medicine, media and entertainment, warfare, transportation, mining, food and agriculture. Technology transfer includes 'hard' material technologies of manufacturing and construction as well as 'soft technologies' of imaging and information that are taken up in the design process and penetrate the very structure of architectural practice. Such technology transfer is sometimes seen to threaten the supposed internal consistency and specificity of architectural techniques at the same time as it is keenly sought after. Its effect on notions of design intentions and their realization is a key problematic of interest to this conference.

For more information please visit the AASA 2007 conference web site.

Fashion in Fiction Conference

A cooperation of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, and the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building
26 - 27 May, 2007

This transdisciplinary conference, a creative collaboration between the Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building and the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, will investigate the role fashion has played in fictional narratives from the 19th century to the present. In particular, it will examine specific fashion discourses or conversations within fiction, assessing the role, function, and purposes of clothes, fashion movements, style and image to create narratives within narratives.

For more information please visit the Fashion in Fiction Conference web site.

Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference

Centre for Social Theory & Design
20 - 21 February 2007

Drawing together scholars from a broad interdisciplinary field, the Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference aims to encourage discussion of queer space conceived in its broadest sense, by scholars working in disciplines as diverse as architecture, history, urban geography, design, visual communication, cultural studies, and the social sciences. It aims to explore ways in which the built environment contributes to the construction and maintenance of queer sub-cultures, and articulate how both architectural space and the city can represent ideas such as 'queerness'.

Using the city of Sydney as one example, the conference opens to broader international approaches by proposing that, while in many spheres of world affairs Australia is seen as peripheral, in the already 'marginal' space of queer culture Sydney is a major international location, especially during events such as the Mardi Gras. Drawing upon this reversal of definitions of 'centre' and 'periphery', this conference asks what is central, and what is peripheral, to the study of queer space.

For more information please visit the Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries Conference website.

Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity Conference 2006

Centre for Social Theory & Design
17 - 19 August 2006

Walter Benjamin's work remains central to discussions of modernity within the Humanities, Visual Arts, Design and Architecture. This conference will bring together scholars working on all aspects of Benjamin's work as well as those who deploy the insights of that work in developing projects of their own.

The conference has been organised by the Centre for Social Theory and Design, in particular: Dr Tara Forrest, Professor Andrew Benjamin and Dr Charles Rice.

The aim of the Centre for Social Theory and Design is to provide a location for research that draws on the traditions of Critical and Social Theory, Philosophy, Design Theory and History, and Architectural History and Theory.

Please visit the official Walter Benjamin Conference 2006 web site for more details.

Australasian Universities Building Educators Association (AUBEA) Conference 2006

Faculty's School of the Built Environment
12 - 14 July 2006

The Faculty's School of Construction Property & Project Management will host the 31st Annual Conference. With a general conference theme of "Building in Value", day one will have a teaching focus, day two an industry focus (industry day) and day three a research focus (research day). This web site provides information to help you submit a paper, register for the conference and plan your trip to Sydney. The AUBEA 2006 conference web site will be regularly updated as conference details are developed.

The principle aim of AUBEA is to promote and improve teaching and research in building through communication and collaboration. It also aims to coordinate efforts to market the discipline of building to prospective students, research partners and clients.

In 2006, the scope of the conference has deliberately been widened to include themes relating to property and land economics.

Please visit the official AUBEA Conference 2006 web site for more details.

COSMOPOLITANISM AND PLACE: the designs of resistance

Inaugural Conference of the Centre for Social Theory and Design held at UTS 21 - 22 October 2005

The keynote speakers were Catherine Malabou. University of Paris X (Nanterre); Cameron Tonkinwise. University of Technology Sydney; Eyal Weizman. Goldsmiths College University of London; Duncan Ivinson. University of Sydney

The cosmopolitan can be used to begin to locate oppositional strategies to globalisation while at the time allowing for the development of sites of resistance - sites allowing for a reconfiguring of terms such as 'place', 'region' etc. However, what seems to have been positioned beyond such possibilities is design. (Design in this context is to be given the greatest extension possible. It included architecture as much as that which is institutionally identified with design.) In the 1920s when design was explicated in terms of style, the latter was often defined in relation to the national question. It was argued that style reflected, or should reflect, national concerns. The simple move to the international - where the counter to the national becomes no more that a ubiquitous internationalism - fails to address the possibility that there maybe on the level of design a correlate to cosmopolitanism. Fundamental to such a possibility would be the recognition that cosmopolitanism, in giving priority to place and region - at least as a beginning - cannot be reduced to a single organising set of ideas let alone a single appearance. Hence the question - how is the relationship between cosmopolitanism and design to be understood?

Answering this question necessitates as much a theoretical and philosophical reflection on the nature of the cosmopolitan, if not design itself, as it does interventions by architects and designers. Part of the process was the development of modes of thinking proper to a productive interplay of cosmopolitanism and design.

This conference brought together leading philosophers, architectural theorists, architects and designers to explore the differing possibilities to which a rethinking of design might give rise.

IMAGINARY WORLDS. Image and Space

International Symposium 14 October 2005

The Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney, in conjunction with Supanova Pop Culture Expo hosted an international symposium on October 14, 2005 in Sydney, Australia.

Please visit the Symposium papers to access published papers from this Symposium.

The significance of this symposium was to bring together scholars to share their expertise in the field of graphic novels, comics, animation, literature and computer gaming.

The Symposium addressed the design and construction of 'imaginary worlds' and explored the many and varied ways in which image and space, both real and imagined, are formed and transformed in popular culture and how culturally specific knowledge and design practices are articulated and conveyed.