22 May 2010

Rhode Island School of Design: call for papers

Focus of Volume 02:
In recent years much of the built infrastructure associated with the UK's traditional industries - the legacy of the first Industrial Revolution has fallen into disuse. That holds true similarly for Europe as a whole and the United States.
As industrial processes that were once the backbone of economic progress in these countries developed, declined and/or became outsourced to emerging third world markets, the fate of these once robust industrial structures fell into question.

In the US, a growing number of cities, many in the Northeast - the birthplace of America's Industrial Revolution - are searching for strategies to rehabilitate their underutilized industrial buildings. These structures, many of which are historic, include, textile mills, steel mills, breweries, power stations, automobile manufacturing plants, coal plants, and others. Some cities, in fact, have made the Adaptive Reuse of vacant industrial buildings an integral part of their infill development, as 'smart growth'.

While the annual embodied energy of building materials and energy used to construct buildings anew is estimated at 1.146 MBtu/sf, for renovation it is only half. As such, the practice of Adaptive Reuse, applied to this growing industrial building stock through architecture and design, contributes significantly to the global efforts towards reducing energy consumption as a byproduct of construction. Due in great part to the global realization of these facts, Adaptive Reuse has emerged and is evolving even in countries where cultural and/or value differences have prevented this practice until now.

Volume 02 of the Int|AR Journal will explore and document international examples of transforming the vast legacy of obsolete structures resulting from the decline of industrialization through creative adaptive reuse strategies, and their underlying theoretical positions.
We seek proposals of no more than 200 words on investigations of the challenges of adapting and transforming industrial structures and sites around the globe. Final papers may range from 1000 to 3000 words.

Please send questions and proposal submissions to intarjournal@risd.edu (as pdf files 10Mb max). For more information please visit our website at: intar-journal.risd.edu/  

About Int|AR Journal
Established in 2009 as the first American academic publication focusing on Design and Adaptive Reuse, the Int|AR Journal and its web presence explore this inherently sustainable practice through multi-faceted investigations and paradigmatic examples. Its domain encompasses issues of design in preservation, conservation, alteration and interventions within architectural practice, urban and landscape design, and the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, art and design