STUDIO, a magazine about the contemporary urban condition, has launched a call for papers entitled Illegal to investigate the existence of different ways of making architecture and consequent alternative processes of urban reality transformation. Studio is a seasonal independent journal edited and directed by Romolo Calabrese together with RRC studio architects. It's based in Milan, but its reach is global. It addresses issues involving the urban context, its strategies and its developments.
The selected papers will define the field of interest of an issue and produce a context in which to situate contributions.
The brief is the following: “Architecture has always held an important role in defining spaces conditioning human behavior; laws, codes, norms trace a practice line which, even if it is not always shared, offers contemplative moments and consequent actions/reactions.
Illegal buildings are the architectural answer to society's needs: you cannot attribute them only a negative meaning, but you must recognize a need and a thrust for transformation.
Legal buildings are not always the architectural answer to society's needs: you cannot attribute them only a positive meaning, but you must recognize their need imposed by the interest of a few.
Who has the right/duty to define the thin boundary between legality and illegality? Is there still a clear difference between these two terms or are there hybrid situations where it is possible to find a co-existence of these two realities? Which architecture and which city for the illegality?”
Submissions may be essays, photo essays, illustrations, case studies, projects, interviews, comic strips and so on.
The competition involves two stages. In the first, which closes on July 20th, contributors must submit a 200 word abstract written in English, whose maximum size including any image if present must not exceed 2mb.
In the second stage, selected contributors will be asked to make a final submission written in English and in the original language not exceeding 3,000 words and in .doc format. Photographic essays should come with a description of maximum 500 words and images should be full colour (CMYK) in TIFF or JPEG format 300 ppi 18x25cm drawings should be in colour in PDF format. All copyright details should be indicated. A short 50-word bio of the author should also be annexed. The deadline for stage 2 will be 25th August 2014.
The selected articles will be published in September 2014.
More information can be found here
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