FRASCARI SYMPOSIA

The sixth Frascari Symposium honors the memory of sidereal architect, theorist, and educator Marco Frascari (1945–2013). This symposium proposes an agenda for theorizing finishing by asking participants to explore the topic through one or more of these three currents, consisting of Surfaces: Finishing as Polishing; Projects: Finishing as Completing; and Times: Finishing as Ending. The symposium gathers architectural dreamers, storytellers, and critics to weave their tallest tales in the Vichian tradition, as interpreted and represented in architectural theories and histories recounted by Frascari, the “Traumarbeiter” himself. For more information, please visit: www.marcofrascaridreamhouse.com.

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The first Frascari Symposium, on the topic of “Towards a Critical Phenomenology,” was hosted at The Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism of Carleton University in 2013. It was recorded in the publication: A Carefully Folded Ham Sandwich, edited by Roger Connah. The symposium began with the question “What has phenomenology to offer architects today?”, then set out a challenge to future architects by repositioning the architect in the moment of 2013, echoing and re-assessing the work of Heidegger and Arendt.

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One year later, in 2014, following Frascari’s death, the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech held the second Frascari Symposium, entitled “Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture,” which also became a reunion of friends and family, students and colleagues. An anthology is forthcoming from Routledge, edited by Paul Emmons, Marcia Feuerstein, and Carolina Dayer. This symposium honored the life and work of Marco Frascari, while opening a place to critically discuss new and imaginative architectural confabulations.

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“Ceilings and Dreams: The Architecture of Levity” was the subject of the third Frascari Symposium held in 2017 at Washington Alexandria Architecture Center - Virginia Polytechnic and State University. Co-organizers of the symposium were Paul Emmons, Naseem B. Falla, Marcia Feuerstein, and Jodi La Coe. The Symposium honored the memory of sidereal architect, theorist, and educator Marco Frascari (1945-2013). The Symposium was centered around contemplation on the implications of ceilings and dreams, addressing any period, culture, or building activity that touched on one or more of three areas: Reverie (theory), Suspense (materiality), and Inversion (representation).

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The fourth Frascari Symposium, called "Secret Lives of Architectural Drawings and Models" took place in 2019 at the School of Architecture and Landscape at Kingston University, London, UK. The symposium was convened by Federica Goffi and Mary Vaughan Johnson. In translation from drawings to buildings, the Frascari Symposium IV questioned the significance of the lives of drawings and models - before, during, and after construction - raising the issue of where these dwell in relation to buildings, how they impact their seminality, and their potential future translations from drawing to building, building to drawing.

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The fifth Frascari Symposium, on the theme of “Theaters of Architectural Imagination”, was held during the Covid pandemic in 2021. This posed severe challenges for both public theater and public architecture. However, these ancient art-forms have endured past pandemics, and the human desire for in-person collective transformative experience will resume – potentially with renewed vigor. Hence, this symposium seized the opportunity to renew theatrical and architectural modes of imagination by exploring the mnemonic, performative, and participatory aspects of architecture. The symposium was hosted by the Centre de Design, Université du Québec à Montréal (UQÀM), and the Faculty of Architecture, University of Manitoba, Canada. It was co-chaired by Lisa Landrum, University of Manitoba and Sam Ridgway, University of Adelaide, in collaboration with Louise Pelletier, UQÀM, and Alberto Pérez-Gómez, McGill University.

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We anticipate the Frascari Symposium to continue as a biennial event that will travel to interested academic institutions and assemble distinctive voices. In the practice of Plato’s Symposium, we gather to chew over a topic and digest one another's viewpoints, all washed down with a hefty dose of merriment and conviviality.