GOLD: the 33rd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand – Call For Papers

GOLD: the 33rd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand
Faculty of Architecture, Building & Planning and ACAHUCH (Australian Collaboratory for Architectural History, Urban and Cultural Heritage), Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Australia
6-9 July, 2016

Conference Website

GOLD, for millennia, has fascinated humanity and possessed an extraordinary value amongst most civilizations. It was the favoured ultimate currency in many cultures and served as the signal form of capital: both its accumulation and its waste. It was the catalyst of wars, and constituted its spoils. Gold is the adjective to describe mythical lands: for Marco Polo, Japan was ‘Zipangu, the Land of Gold’. There have been venerated building types celebrating religious and cultural beliefs like ‘golden’ temples and ‘golden’ houses like Nero’s Domus Aurea. There have been buildings to protect gold, buildings which openly display it. In art and architectural historiography, there have been ‘golden’ periods and ‘golden ages’. Gold is about luxury, glamour and excess. It also has as its direct opposite objects of no value, things that might be described as worthless.

The 33rd Annual SAHANZ Conference to be held in Melbourne in July 2016 is to be devoted to the exploration of architecture and gold. The public announcement in 1851 that gold had been discovered in the newly created state of Victoria changed the course of Australian history. Melbourne, the state’s capital, grew to be one of the world’s great provincial metropolises and gold was its motor. In 1854, the Victorian Gold Discovery Committee observed that “The discovery of the Victorian Goldfields has converted a remote dependency into a country of world wide fame; it has attracted a population, extraordinary in number, with unprecedented rapidity; it has enhanced the value of property to an enormous extent; it has made this the richest country in the world; and, in less than three years, it has done for this colony the work of an age, and made its impulses felt in the most distant regions of the earth.” Melbourne is thus the ideal conference venue for critically examining gold and the history of the built environment.

Papers are invited that examine and reflect on various aspects and examples of this theme within different cultural contexts. There are many ways that this can be approached as suggested by the following sub-themes:

  • architecture and capitalism
  • colonial and neo-liberal transformations in Asia and the circulation of people and commodities
  • veins of gold: colonisation, imperialism and neo-liberalism
  • Victorian prosperity: the phenomena of gold rushes in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, South America and elsewhere in the world
  • towns: their landscapes, foundation and sometime disappearance
  • gold rushes as triggers for migration and the transfer of ideas, people and technologies
  • gold diggers: labour migration, mining and casino cultures
  • golden lands, golden kingdoms and ‘gold’ places like the Gold Coast and the Golden Horn in Istanbul
  • buildings and gold: treasuries, golden houses, golden temples, even the Smithsons’ Golden Lane housing
  • gold medals: as accolades in architecture, for architects, expositions as in sport
  • gold and its connotations of ornament, gilding, and the rise of décor
  • the meaning of gold in different cultural settings like Japan and Mexico;
  • Spandau Ballet’s ‘Gold’ and 1980s architecture culture
  • ‘golden days’ and a ‘golden age’: questions of architectural history and historiography
  • gold and the idea of preciousness in conservation
  • gold, alchemy, materiality and craft
  • gold and the interior (picture palaces, James Bond, the ‘solid gold’ disco era and 1970s glamour)
  • penniless: spaces of abjection in new global economies
  • “All that glisters is not gold”: reflections on architecture and authenticity

Abstract submission

Abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted via the Online Conference Paper Management website.

You will need to create a Login ID and password to allow secure uploading of your abstract. Abstracts will be blind reviewed by at least two members of the Conference Academic Committee. External referees may be called upon to review an abstract if needed. Full papers (4500 words, including notes) will be double blind peer reviewed and those accepted for presentation at the conference will be published on the conference website, with print-on-demand editions of the full conference proceedings available after the conference at additional cost.

Please note that in addition to a sole-authored proposal, a participant may also be named on a second, co-authored submission but no more. Irrespective of who would deliver the latter paper, if accepted for presentation and publication, each author is required to register to attend the conference. Authors may not present more than one paper as a sole author. Authors may not present more than two papers as a co-author.

Work submitted for review and for publication in the conference proceedings should be original research that has not previously been published elsewhere, or work that has undergone substantial development from a prior publication.

Plenary Session themes

Participants may choose to submit their abstract/paper for consideration in the general program, or submit the abstract for review in one of the plenary sessions listed on the website. The purpose of the plenary session is to provide a more focused forum for academics already engaged in specific topic with additional time for discussion and critical feedback. Plenary sessions will be allocated two hours in which speakers will present truncated 15-minute presentations, leaving one hour for discussion and debate. Plenary session participants are encouraged to distribute final accepted papers to each other for advanced reading before the conference.

Please note, inclusion in a plenary session does not guarantee acceptance into the final program and is dependent on the paper review process. All papers, including the papers of session chairs, are considered individual submissions, which will undergo the same double blind peer review process mentioned above. Some plenary sessions may expand into two if there are enough individual papers that fit under one theme. If plenary sessions fail to gather enough qualified papers, the session may be dissolved and accepted papers will be redistributed into the general conference program.

Participants interested in presenting at a specific plenary session should indicate their preference by uploading their papers under the plenary session theme on the Online Conference Paper Management website. Abstracts which have been accepted through the peer review process but not accepted into a plenary session will be invited to submit the full paper for peer review for the general program.

Abstracts due: 14 October, 2015.