The American Institute of Architecture Students at Syracuse is excited to announce that we have been selected to host the Fall 2010 Northeast Quad Conference. Each semester a different chapter of the AIAS hosts a themed Quad Conference to offer students within the region an opportunity to visit a new city, explore a new school of design and thought, and most importantly to learn from and be inspired by speakers and workshops. Our theme for Fall 2010 is Reclaiming Architect[ure], a dynamic look at our position within the architecture profession.
The goal of Reclaiming Architect[ure] is to host a conference where we as student leaders and emerging professionals will meet for one weekend to discuss and influence the changing role of the architect in our society and profession. Reclaiming Architect[ure] is not about sustainability, urbanism, preservation, politics, or service, it is about each of these ideas and their relationships to architecture and the architect. Ultimately we are the future of this profession and we have this opportunity to stop, look around ourselves, and chart a new course. Our theme centers around the diminishing role of the architect in society and what options are available to us as emerging professionals to truly re-envision and reconstruct the role of the architect in all walks of life.
The central component of the conference will be a two day symposium featuring speakers from disciplines which were once key to today’s more marginalized architectural discipline. We hope bring regional politicians, urban planners, community activists, practicing architects and designers, academics, and others in order to have a conversation about the position of architecture in these various disciplines. The symposium and the rest of the conference is not meant to be an academic discussion amongst these speakers but rather an invitation for debate and every possible perspective so everyone can have an open and candid conversation about architectures future as an interdisciplinary catalyst. Reclaiming Architect[ure]’s purpose is to raise questions about the status and direction of this profession and most importantly to offer insight and experience for finding the answers and solutions.
We as students and emerging professionals are at an inflection point in our world. Vice President Joseph Biden’s 2009 Syracuse University Commencement address makes exceptionally clear the potential of our generation:
“There has never been a time when students are graduating at a moment when they actually have the chance to make more than incremental change. That’s where we are today. Throughout the span of history, only a handful of us have been alive at a time when we can actually shape the course of history. I call these inflection points. There's not a single decision confronting us now that doesn't yield change from non- action as well as action. The world we have built cannot sustain itself in the direction it's going now. Just as with every generation that is at an inflection point in history, it's totally within your power to shape history and literally bend it.”
